


Collateral

by loosecannon, sheepknitssweater



Series: Collateral [1]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Autonomy Issues, Character Study, Eddie Kaspbrak Struggles With Selfhood, Getting Back Together, Happy Ending, Humor and Misery, M/M, Memory, Music, Recreational Drug Use, Richie Tozier Struggles with Having Killed Someone, Romantic Comedy, Stanley Uris Lives, canon-typical trauma, intimacy issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:47:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 54,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23619241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loosecannon/pseuds/loosecannon, https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheepknitssweater/pseuds/sheepknitssweater
Summary: The afternoon Richie was acquitted of killing a human being, he walked with Eddie from the courthouse to his rental car. It wasn’t a nice day, but a yellow Volkswagen bug rolled past them, taking its time, probably carrying God, and Eddie punched him. He remembered. Richie wished Eddie had hit him harder, so he could remember Eddie remembering, and then he wished he weren’t so fucked in the head.Eddie and Richie come of age together twice.
Relationships: Beverly Marsh & Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak & Myra Kaspbrak, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Richie Tozier & Stanley Uris
Series: Collateral [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1735957
Comments: 121
Kudos: 406





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Podfic available: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25534078/chapters/61954090

**Richie**

The afternoon Richie was acquitted of killing a human being, he walked with Eddie from the courthouse to his rental car. It wasn’t a nice day, but a yellow Volkswagen bug rolled past them, taking its time, probably carrying God, and Eddie punched him. He remembered. Richie wished Eddie had hit him harder, so he could remember Eddie remembering, and then he wished he weren’t so fucked in the head.

When they got to the car, Eddie stopped for a second before he unlocked it, looking up at Richie with the face he always used to make when Richie was too abjectly pathetic even to act obnoxious. It became abruptly essential to prove Eddie wrong. “Hey! Buick, blue dick,” Richie exclaimed, broadly gesturing more than grabbing at his crotch with one hand and pointing at the first vaguely old-looking car he could find.

Richie watched Eddie very briefly consider whether to throttle him. “That’s not even a Buick,” he said. “That was always the problem. You wanted all these new rules, but—first of all, like you needed any excuse to grab your dick, you were doing that anyway. Second, you think every luxury sedan from the seventies is a Buick. So what’s the point?” Eddie was buckling his seatbelt now, adjusting the mirrors. Maybe he was going to put his hand on the back of Richie’s headrest when he backed the car up—every time he’d done that in high school had been a calamitous sexual event for Richie. 

“Not all of us get our dicks wet in tailpipes,” Richie said. “You can’t expect me to know all the species of car without that kind of incentive.” Before Eddie could respond, Ira Glass’s voice started blaring through the car speakers. “Holy shit,” Richie said, “you were listening to _This American Life_ on your way to get clown-murdered?” 

“Shut up,” Eddie said, and cranked it even louder. 

“In the first act,” Richie said, nasally, projecting hard to be heard over the speaker, “we’ll hear the story of how one man went down to clown town. Hey, what’s your passcode?”

“I’m not telling Ira Glass my passcode,” Eddie said.

Richie crowed triumphantly. “So you admit that, in this Subaru, Ira Glass briefly—”

“Yeah, you fucking channelled Ira Glass, do I look like I give a shit? 0573. Please don’t play the Descendents.”

“A word from our sponsors,” Richie said, and cranked “Don’t You Want Me” instead. Eddie didn’t have Spotify, the fucking weirdo, so he had to find it on YouTube. At this point, Eddie’s knuckles were white against the steering wheel.

“It’s a question a lot of our listeners are asking themselves,” Richie bellowed, back to Ira Glass. “We have to reach inside, _way way_ inside, and ask: would _you_ go down on the town clown?” At that, Eddie’s face went bright red. Well, better now than later, if Richie was going to disgust him either way. It was in that spirit that Richie lowered the volume and, half against his will, took the kill shot. “Speaking of which. I was the leper, right? That was me?”

Eddie did a weird upper-body twitch, and his eyes cut sharply to Richie. Then he blinked hard and started staring with excess attention at the windshield, like he was driving through rain. He made a very precise right turn, hands at ten and two. Richie watched his jaw work for a minute; he was gearing up to hear something really mean, but then— “Actually, no. It was more just—” Eddie cleared his throat and did a heartrending little wave. “Gay… ness. In general.”

“In general?” 

“Yes,” Eddie said, “in fucking general.” 

“So like, a disembodied dick in an ass, just floating around, tormenting you.”

“That’s exactly what I mean,” he said.

“Basking in the radioactive sludge of your own gay vibes like Marie Curie.”

“My fucking—?” Eddie said, and braked very aggressively at a yellow light. But then Richie heard the instantly recognizable in-hold-out-hold rhythm of yuppie respiratory mindfulness. “Yeah, Richie, you got it. Thanks so much,” he finished, a little vicious but contained.

Richie had been banking on an answer he could twist to make Eddie talk about how Richie was getting off scot-free for killing someone, how fucked up this was, etc. If Richie couldn’t get that by insinuating that Eddie seemed gay, he probably couldn’t get it from anything. Instead, he cranked the stereo as loud as it would go and put on “Suburban Home,” which, aside from being Eddie’s least favorite song in the world at age 17, also functioned as a little additional jab.

“Fuck _you_ ,” Eddie shouted, and fumbled to tear the aux cord out of the phone. Here was the magic of Bluetooth! Finally, after years of pretending, Richie truly understood the appeal of high-tech gadgets. He held Eddie’s phone out of his reach.

“I’m gonna get lost,” Eddie said. “I’m gonna get lost in Derry and miss my flight and it’ll be your fucking fault.”

“You’ve never gotten lost driving anywhere,” Richie said.

“You’re gonna have to pay my flight cancellation fee. And—if the plane I’m on instead of the one I was supposed to be on crashes, or if there’s Legionnaire’s in the AC and I die—”

“What the fuck?”

“My blood’s on your hands,” Eddie finished. “That’ll be on you.”

The song’s first play ended, and the repeat started.

“Oh, fuck,” Eddie said. “Richie, I didn’t mean—um.” He was pulling up outside the townhouse, somehow parallel parking with his whole body turned toward Richie as he tried to make eye contact. That was something else Richie thought was hot in high school, the way Eddie drove with eerie technical genius even when wracked by guilt. It was still hot now.

_I WANNA BE MASOCHISTIC, I WANNA BE A STATISTIC,_ Milo Aukerman sang, before the Bluetooth disconnected with a soft double-beep. “No fuckin’ worries, Eds,” Richie said, and made for the hotel.

Eddie’s room was pretty much identical to Richie’s, except that, in Eddie’s room, there were neither dirty boxers nor weed crumbs strewn across the floor. Also, Eddie had hung up all his polo shirts in the hotel wardrobe. “Dude, what’s with the stockpile?” Richie asked. “Did you think Pennywise would fuck up the polo shirt supply chain? To traumatize you?”

“Stockpiling’s what fucks up the supply chain in the first place,” Eddie said, shutting the door behind him. 

Richie sat on the neatly-made double bed. He considered offering to fold something, then decided against it, knowing that he would put wrinkles in anything he touched and Eddie would make some weird attempt at politeness while furiously re-ironing all of it. It had historically been pretty funny to watch Eddie try to be gracious while clearly thinking _STOP PUTTING YOUR SWEATY HANDS ON MY STUFF DIPSHIT_ , but Richie wasn’t really in the mood now. Eddie was already trying to be nice to him today, and it was fucking awful.

Eddie went into the bathroom and reemerged with a toiletry bag the size of a toolbox. He gave Richie a warning look. “I don’t want to hear it,” he said. Literally said, _I don’t want to hear it_ , like an offensive caricature of himself, or like Ian MacKaye in Minor Threat. To distract himself, Richie briefly considered which of these characterizations was funnier. Ian MacKaye, he decided.

“It’s weird how much you hated punk,” Richie said. “You were such an angry little fuck.”

“I cared about the integrity of my ears,” Eddie said. “I still do, actually.”

Eddie was turned toward the closet, taking his shirts down. His ears were tiny perfect ovals. Richie couldn’t help looking at them. “Didn’t you blow out the Volvo’s speakers blasting _Reckoning_?” he said.

“No,” Eddie said. “I voluntarily replaced the speakers, which is what you do when you want your car to be nice, which you wouldn’t have known because you couldn’t _drive_ until we were _eighteen_.”

Richie could now do a bit about either his own legal blindness, Eddie’s teal station wagon, or the album. “You played it _way_ too much,” he ended up saying. “Every time I heard it for years I was like, oh shit, Eddie’s about to glare at me while he does calc homework for two hours, this is great.”

“I’m sure that—” Eddie started, then froze. He turned to Richie slowly, eyes wide. “You remembered that long?” he demanded.

“You still like R.E.M.?”

Eddie’s eyebrows went very low. “Can you answer the fucking question?”

“I’m answering the question,” Richie said. “Do you still like R.E.M. or not?”

“I asked first.”

“I asked second.”

Eddie looked so mad. It was the most soothingly familiar thing Richie had seen in his life. “Are you a child?”

“I’m gonna assume you don’t like R.E.M. anymore.”

“I don’t _not like_ them,” he said. “I don’t really listen to music. Not for I don’t know how long.”

“Okay,” Richie said. “So you weren’t listening to R.E.M. in college.”

“Not, like—“ Eddie was digging his fingertips into his eye sockets. “Richie, I studied econ. I’m sorry, but I didn’t have a lot of time for the fucking radio. What does this have to do with—”

“You remember that tape I made?” Richie asked.

“You made a lot of tapes.”

“Come on, dude,” Richie said. Still nothing, so he continued, forcing his voice not to waver, “the tape for when we were fooling around,” and then it all seemed to dawn on Eddie very quickly.

There were a lot of songs inextricably tied, for Richie, to certain images. Among them: huge brown eyes under long straight brows; wiry legs, pale at the thigh; a blurry figure coming into Richie’s nearsighted field of focus as it got close, turning into a sharp and vertical face, which wore sometimes a thrilling schooled severity and others a sweet small smile and others yet a totally open grin. Also, there were remembered feelings, literal physical feelings. Fitting his fingertips into the divot behind a collarbone where it jutted out from a shoulder. Eyelashes brushing against Richie’s cheek. A fine-boned hand cradling Richie’s jaw.

It wasn’t that these memories were totally dissociated from the name Eddie. When Richie thought about it, he could remember who that was all right. He could remember, in fact, exactly what they’d done. What he couldn’t remember was why they’d stopped—not because it seemed foggy, but because the answer his brain offered was DO NOT ENTER. It was painfully hot to the touch, this part, and Richie couldn’t help springing back when he skimmed against it. He retained the knowledge—not inaccurate—that he had fucked up very badly. Something had happened—he didn’t want to relive the specifics, so suffice was to say that something had happened—and now Richie was never going to see Eddie again.

Of course Richie, having as he did a pretty fucked relationship to things that were supposed to simply hurt, kept listening to these songs for years. It had taken one incredibly horrible Dinosaur Jr. concert in 1998—when their cover of “Just Like Heaven” had sent him into such an immediate and unbounded depression that he spent the rest of the night steadily working through probably a full ounce of amyl nitrites—for him to come to his senses and throw away several albums. Getting rid of R.E.M.’s entire discography pained him immensely, but he knew, buoyed by the certainty of how unbearably bereaved he felt, that he had to hold his nose and do it anyway.

Now Eddie was staring at him, eyes huge. “You kept listening to it,” he muttered, like he was doing some kind of very distressing mental math.

Richie, trying not to puke, made a strenuous effort to raise his eyebrows. “No shit. You didn’t remember?” he asked. “Seriously? That we were—”

“No,” Eddie said. “I mean, yes, I remember now.”

“Okay,” Richie said, “good. Because, like, I don’t know what the fuck you would’ve thought I was talking about back in the car otherwise.”

Eddie ignored him. “I forgot, though,” he said, voice weirdly insistent. “When we went to college. When I went to Boston. Just—nothing.”

“Don’t feel too bad,” Richie said. “Everyone else did, too.”

“I wish I hadn’t.” Eddie said. “Seriously. Fuck.” He was still staring at Richie, huge-eyed. So fucking cute. Richie did a brief mental inventory of all the items in the room he could bludgeon himself with once this day was over.

“No you don’t,” Richie said. “You’re pretty lucky you didn’t have to spend college remembering all the shit I used to inflict on you, honestly.”

“That’s an idiotic thing to say.”

“I put like three Joy Division songs on that tape. That’s—you know _Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind_?”

“Don’t bring up that fucking movie.”

“I’m saying you’d’ve been handing over fat stacks to get rid of the memory of my glasses digging into your face while Joy Division played. Nobody wants that.”

“That’s a goddamn terrible movie,” Eddie said, and shoved a few pairs of socks into his suitcase. The socks were folded. “You can’t really be glad you forgot.” He sounded—

He sounded _hurt_ , actually.

“You made me gay, dude. When I forgot, I was heterosexual.” Richie said “heterosexual” with a contemptuous ironic nose-wrinkle, but it still felt so mean. He thought a tiny bit of cruelty would be pleasantly bracing, but it did not feel good, the way Eddie looked at him, it did not feel good at all.

“Go to hell, Rich,” Eddie said. “Jesus.”

Richie scrambled for a minute. When they were kids and Richie had been an asshole, the best way to come back from it had been to debase himself in some way—not in the usual ways he debased himself, but worse, admitting something really pathetic and meaning it. _Collateral_ , Eddie had always called this. He had an insurer’s soul. “I’m kidding, obviously. Like, I blew a married Uber driver,” Richie tried, hoping this was enough of an olive branch. He hadn’t been this vulnerable for anyone, not even the Uber guy—haha, oh god—in years. “That’s as degenerate as behavior gets.”

Of course, it wasn’t real collateral. Real collateral wasn't funny. “Yeah, heterosexuals: pretty fucking ridiculous, right?” Eddie said, and he zipped his suitcase with a neat geometric motion. His arms were really amazing.

“Eds,” he tried again, and Eddie turned around to glare at him. “Back in high school, I tried to write you a song.” Eddie just looked at him, the anger falling from his face in increments, muscle by muscle. He was stuck between expressions. Richie couldn't take the suspense, so he clarified: “When we were doing, like, sneaky gay shit.”

“Richie—” 

“It was absolutely the worst song ever, Eds. I had this insane idea that if I played you the perfect love ballad you’d take me with you.” He started to sing. “I’ve got fireworks and you’ve got rubbing alcohol. Let’s start a fire and watch this town burn up.” He was trying desperately to undercut any potential sincerity by doing a Morrissey. Somehow this made it even worse, but he was locked into it now. “We’ll wade across the riverbed, I’ll give you every-morning head, you don’t know what you do to me, Eds—” 

Eddie had turned a near-purple shade of red; Richie felt in the thrall of something like the humiliation version of a berserker rage. As long as he kept it going, he wouldn’t have to hear what Eddie said next. “We’ll find somewhere they know what you’re worth, we’ll go to New York or California to surf, and I’ll want to wake up in the morning, I’ll wake up next to you.” He faltered. “Uh, and then there’s a line about how you were always, like, diabolically cheating on tests. You had the cheatsheet to my heart. Or fucking whatever, I don’t know.”

Eddie didn’t say anything, so Richie kept talking. “I’m just telling you,” he said, “I used to do really brave, stupid shit. When I forgot I started doing just stupid shit, and then just, really meaningless little stupid shit. Shit that could kill me, but not for any reason. Before, it had—like. Meant something.”

Eddie just looked at him for awhile. His sweet soft eyes and straight nose and serious mouth. Everyone, excluding Richie, had grown up hot, but Eddie’d grown up fucking beautiful. “You saved Mike’s life,” he said. “You saved me, too.”

“You too, and you didn’t even axe-murder anyone in the process.”

“That makes you even braver, asshole.” 

“Fluke,” Richie said. “We’ll be back to the regularly scheduled who-cares-if-there’s-fentanyl-in-this-molly programming by the end of the week.” At this point, Richie would do anything to have done toxic molly instead of having killed a guy. Brave made him a murderer. Stupid just made him stupid.

Richie didn’t say any of that. “Anyway,” he went on, “I was shit at guitar. The song never really happened.”

“Rich,” Eddie said quietly, and then he’d wrapped his arms around Richie and was saying something that sounded a lot like, “not a fluke,” into his neck. This made Richie want to die almost as much as the rest of the hug, which was utterly perfect, did. Eddie was warm and wiry and smelled exactly like himself, even under all the antiseptic shit. 

It was crazy how much Richie wanted to slip into old patterns. Used to be he would plant a huge wet smacking kiss on Eddie’s cheek, close to his mouth, and then Eddie, adorably vengeful, would kiss him for real.

Now, obviously, he wouldn't. Eddie was married. Richie couldn’t just float through the world as somebody’s disembodied first move anymore, either—he killed a guy, _fuck_ —but how else was he supposed to exist? He took one last long inhale of Eddie, then planted a huge wet smacking kiss on his cheek.

Eddie sprang back, swatting at him. “Dude, I have a _wound_ ,” he said, patting at his stitches. 

“A _wound_ ,” Richie said, and fake-swooned onto the bed, arm over his eyes, so he didn’t have to see Eddie leave.

But Eddie didn’t flee. Stubborn bastard. “Listen,” he said, “just stay in touch, okay?”

Richie didn’t lift his arm. “Yeah,” he said, “if I see Pennywise chilling at Universal Studios I’ll let you know.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Eddie said. Richie heard his throat click, like he was about to say something else, but then a couple seconds passed and he just said, “okay, well. Safe travels.”

Like anyone wanted Richie to be safe, or have travels. If Eddie did, he was playing a losing goddamn game, like canasta. Even if you won canasta, you lost, because it’s canasta and you spent time on it.

He actually learned canasta from Eddie’s mom, before he’d started being gay and she’d started hating him. Fuck, that was funny.

Eddie had brought one of those wheely suitcases, and it went _buh-BUM-buh-BUM_ on the hollow grey wood of the townhouse stairs. Like a rapid heartbeat. Kind of. Richie wanted Eddie’s suitcase to leave indents on the stairs, wanted it more than anything, God knew why. Richie didn’t. Sometimes he wanted things that didn’t make sense. Some illness bad enough that he wouldn’t have to keep going through the motions of being a person; for Eddie to break up with his wife over the phone; a flamethrower. He wanted to follow Eddie out to his car, too, but he didn’t, just lay on the bed that smelled like Eddie in the room where Eddie’s stuff had briefly been. He cried a little, motionless, into the crook of his arm. Maybe he fell asleep. When he stepped outside to smoke on the steps, he searched for any mark Eddie might have left. He found nothing.

Bev must have snuck up behind him, because Richie didn’t hear her until she plunked down beside him with a stiff dad-groan. He scrubbed at his eyes, thankful for the dark. Bev elbowed him in the side while she silently grabbed at him in search of cigarettes. 

“Boundaries, Bev.” He said. She just sniffled. Richie looked over. 

She was wearing Ben’s T-shirt like a dress, barefoot and bare-assed. She was crying. Growing up, he’d seen her naked butt dozens of times. He’d only seen her cry once, before this.

“Fuck off,” she said preemptively. “Can I have a cigarette?” 

He gave her one, resisting the urge to pat her on the back. She blew her nose into Ben’s sleeve. 

“Gross. Poor Ben,” he said, because he was an idiot. 

“I fucked Bill, too,” she said. “And not, like, in general. Last Tuesday. Which is a serious case of ‘gross, poor Ben.’”

“At least you’re getting some.” Richie was not funny. 

“He’s married! I fucked one-third of my friends in one week and made Bill cheat on his wife.”

“You didn’t _make_ Bill do anything, first of all. I’m sorry, but your pussy’s not that fucking magnetic.” She cackle-sobbed. “And marriage is a lie. People who get married deserve what they get, present company notwithstanding.”

“Ben’s in love with me,” she said in one breath. “He told me.”

“What about you?”

“I don’t know. I think I just used him.”

“That’s on him. I’m serious, okay? Being in love is selfish. You deserve to take something in return, like that dick.”

“Wow, clichéd _and_ bleak.” She was acting more like herself, which Richie regretted. “Who are you selfishly in love with, then?”

“Maybe—and this is a little crazy—but maybe I’m sad because of the murder and the giant trauma-monster.”

“Nope. Only guys who’ve been rejected say that shit. Anyway, I told you my secret.” 

“I gave you a cigarette.”

“Is it me?”

“What? No, Bev, the fuck?”

“Wait. Are you gay?”

“That’s psychotic. Assuming all men are either madly in love with you or gay is fucking psychotic. ” Bev retracted her legs into Ben’s shirt for warmth. Hugging her knees, she looked like a lumpy, tearstained midget. “I’m gonna cite my prior comment about your pussy: not that fucking magnetic.”

Bev didn’t say glass houses, despite the fact that Richie was an axe murderer. Instead, she said, “My dad died from seizures, two months after I hit him over the head. He was in love with me.” She pushed her cigarette butt into the step, staring at it intently. “Probably good that you’re not.”

“Your dad was a shitty person,” he said. Bev kept crushing the cigarette. “You’re not actually crazy, you’re just hot.” 

“Bullshit, I’m not.” She didn’t look at Richie.

“It’s Eddie,” he said. Who was crazy now? “I’m in love with Eddie. So. You were right.”

She looked up. Richie almost puked. “Okay,” she said. “I mean, thanks. And I’m sorry.” Richie was going to fall down the steps and break his neck. “He kinda gives off a gay vibe, though.” 

Richie didn’t say, “you’re telling me.” It was maybe the only morally correct thing he’d done all day. “Doesn’t matter,” he said instead, and stubbed out his cigarette. “My pussy isn’t that magnetic.”

Stan was in the lobby, filling out a crossword and eating a tiny packet of trail mix. “Hi,” he said, nodding to them. His gaze was fixed very rigidly at the level of Bev’s eyes. _Prude_ , Richie thought, then remembered that Stan was straight and probably didn’t want to compound Bev’s trauma by getting a boner or whatever. 

Bev grabbed Richie’s hand in a biting, callused grip and hauled him forward. “Walk me to my room?” she said within deliberate earshot of Stan. She winked at Stan. 

Stan gave her a very calm look. “Can you two keep it down up there?” He turned to Richie. “And be safe.”

He pinched the top of his nose, hard, like he was milking it, and the edge of his sleeve fell back, revealing the thick bandages on his wrists. Richie’s mouth went a little dry. Stan pulled his shirt over them again, because Richie was being painfully weird about Stan’s sewn-up wrists. Richie too-deliberately didn’t look at them, the way Stan acted about Bev's ass. 

To Bev’s credit, she wasn’t floored by the bandages. Richie wondered how many times she’d tried the same thing. Probably none. She was a tough motherfucker, if by right of being somewhat violently insane. He loved her. God, but he really did. 

“Prude,” she mouthed. 

She dragged Richie up the stairs, angry and stronger than she looked. She nearly ripped his hand off when he stopped. 

“What was that about?” Richie asked her like he didn’t know. 

When they arrived at Bev's room, Richie was relieved to see that it was as disgusting as his own. Empty cans of beer and Diet Dr. Pepper lined the bed. The bathtub was full of dirty laundry soaking in detergent, and she’d hung more clothes out to dry on collections of mangled, connected wire hangers. A pair of underwear twisted above Richie’s head, dripping occasionally.

Bev slid down against the door frame into a smooth open-legged squat, giggling. “Come on in, big boy.” She winked, scrunching up half of her face like a stroke victim. A “do not disturb” sign hung from the doorknob.

Richie laughed. Not to be outdone, he fished his phone out of his pocket, pulled up “Psycho Killer,” and turned up the volume. It connected to a single, orphaned Bluetooth speaker in Bev’s room. It was shaped like a heart-eyes emoji.

Bev yanked him into the room, and they both collapsed with insane laughter. Then they started to dance. Bev did a sexy striptease with Ben’s snot-encrusted shirt, flipping up the hem and kicking her legs out like she was wearing a Victorian skirt and dancing to “Proud Mary” or something.

Richie did the _Reservoir Dogs_ dance, brandishing a credit card instead of a knife.

“What the fuck is that?” Bev asked.

“The _Reservoir Dogs_ dance,” Richie said. 

“There is no fucking dance in _Reservoir Dogs._ ” She shimmied, spinning coo-coo fingers next to her head. 

“Yeah, dumbass, when that psychopath cuts off the guy’s ear he does a little dance.” Richie twitched his knees around in the same stiff middle-aged jitterbug as the ear guy. He thought. 

Bev rolled her eyes, lip-syncing: “Run-run-run awaayyy.” 

“What?” Richie said. “I didn’t wanna be lame and do the _Pulp Fiction_ one,” which startled another phlegmy laugh out of Bev. 

“I can’t believe how lame you are, oh my god.” She tackled Richie and tried to gag him with a fistful of unidentifiable damp lace. Richie made some predictable cracks about Ben’s kinks and Bev barking up the homosexual tree. 

And then they both began screaming along to the music: “Psycho killer! Qu'est-ce que c'est!” 

Bev trailed off when it got too French. “Ce que j'ai fais, ce soir la!” Richie yelled in a perfect David Byrne. 

“Did you learn French? What the fuck!” she said.

“I’m a professional,” Richie said, air bassing insanely.

She checked her watch—it was late. He grinned. They went back to shouting lyrics, even louder than before: “We are vain and we are blind!” they screamed at sleeping Derry. 

“We are vain and we are blind!” they screamed at their friends, because none of them would knock on the door and tell them to shut up. Ben was too raw, lain bare and nervous by magnetic pussy, and Stan was still drifting in silent guilt. 

“Psycho Killer” ended. The Derry manslaughter club put on “Jolene” and tried to remember the _Pulp Fiction_ dance. 

**Eddie**

Eddie had decided during the drive to Bangor to dedicate the first half of his free hour at the airport to his marriage, the second to his job. He got as far as texting Myra, _Landing at LGA at two. Don’t wait up, I’ll Uber_ , before he stalled out staring at this one godawful selfie Richie’d left him. His face was tilted downwards, his eyebrows raised as high as they would go, and he was making what Eddie vaguely remembered hearing referred to as a ‘duck face’. The thought of teenage Richie having access to a front-facing camera was as horrifying as it was unavoidable. 

They’d been seventeen, maybe eighteen, in Richie’s room, with the vaulted ceiling and the posters and the persistent stink of terrible weed. A song was playing so loud that Eddie could feel it vibrating along the seams of healed-over bone in his arm. “Boys Don’t Cry.” Eddie was an old man, feeling an oncoming storm. Richie was jumping on the bed. 

Richie had grabbed Eddie’s hands, trying to pull him up onto the bed. “Dance with me!” 

“You’re gay, right?” Eddie had said, suddenly brave or stupid or both. Maybe just contact-high.

“What do you fucking think?” Richie replied, which wasn’t an answer. At which point Eddie had tackled him around the knees, Richie had kissed him, and Eddie, enraged, had kissed back. 

After that, many things that Eddie couldn’t possibly have anticipated began to happen with some regularity. He started drinking—not as much as Richie, of course, but quite a lot—so that it wouldn’t just be Richie who got plausible deniability. He started developing preemptive attachments to songs like “Pictures of You,” “Nightswimming,” and “Ceremony,” bracing in spite of himself for the absolutely excruciating pain he was going to feel when he had to leave.

He also felt plenty of excruciating pain concurrently with all that was happening, particularly when Richie laughed at him, wouldn’t look him in the eye, disappeared for days and re-emerged looking lost. Sometimes something would happen between them—sex, basically—and afterwards Eddie would feel nauseatingly as though he had just told Richie, “I love you,” even though he’d of course done no such thing. It was the oxytocin. In times like those he felt a terrible kinship with different songs altogether, even more humiliating ones. “There is a Light That Never Goes Out,” plus some Fleetwood Mac that he winced to remember even twenty years on. 

BU started earlier than anyone else’s school, so Eddie was the first to leave. They’d all gathered at the Barrens to send him off with the last of their stashes. This included Richie’s massive hoard of fireworks, which he’d amassed over the course of a very short-lived stint at a TNT stand that summer.

Eddie drank the sour apple schnapps offered to him and tried to say goodbye. Mike was commuting to Orono, and he seemed as uncomplicatedly miserable about staying as Eddie was complicatedly miserable about leaving. “It’s the farm,” he was telling Eddie, “you know how it is,” but just as Eddie was getting ready to respond somehow—hug him, maybe—there was a loud crash. Richie had bashed somebody’s dad’s bottle of Maker’s Mark against the rocky outcrop. The bottle’s wax seal lay at Richie’s feet like a particularly dumb parody of all the blood the group of them had shed there over the years.

“Dude, come on,” Bill said. “ _Richie_ ,” Ben said. “Really?” Stan said.

“I’m sorry,” Eddie told Mike, “that really sucks.”

He assumed that ignoring Richie would make him stop being such a dick, but it kept happening—every time Eddie tried to talk seriously with anyone, including Richie, Richie would chug the backwashy dregs of a bottle and smash it, set something off, scrape himself on the rock or get whacked in the head with a branch. The later it got, the less Eddie could see of Richie’s face. “What the fuck was that for?” he asked, when Richie snatched the schnapps from Eddie, drained the bottle, and threw it blindly over his shoulder, but Richie just laughed in that frightening way he sometimes got and didn’t say anything else.

He didn’t say anything before he shoved a Roman candle in an empty tequila bottle and set it off, either. Eddie didn’t even let himself look over until he heard the fizzle of the fuse, and then he saw everything at once: Richie crouched with the shitty lighter Eddie had always warned him was one bad drop away from spontaneous combustion, his hair dangling close to the flame. He stood up slowly, unsteadily, and before he could step away the stupid fucking contraption was launching itself into the air before exploding into a few big shards of heavy glass. Of course, these shards all hit Richie square in the chest. Only one of them caught him with an edge, out of sheer dumb luck, so he wound up blown backwards with a small cut on his stomach instead of dead.

The right lens of Richie’s glasses was shattered. He grinned at whatever fractured version of Eddie he could see through them. Eddie wondered if the glasses were the sole reason Richie wasn’t blind. Like safety goggles.

“I’m going home,” Eddie said. “Bye, everyone. Richie, I hope you don’t fucking die.” 

He got on his old bike and pedaled so hard his legs felt numb, even though he’d been running every day that summer. Derry passed him in terrible high-speed rewind. He saw the Urises’, the Denbroughs’, the diner, the pharmacy—and then he was at his mother’s house. That was all there’d ever been, apparently: houses, stores, a forest, the scariest jerk Eddie was likely ever to meet in his life.

He had thought that was the last time he was going to see anyone before he left, but about an hour later, in bed and staring wide-eyed at the ceiling, he’d heard the telltale clatter of a stick launched at his window, and he stuck his head out to find Richie standing outside, weeping. When Eddie walked across the lawn to ask what was wrong, Richie just started crying harder. Eddie sat cross-legged, and Richie folded in half to bore his forehead into Eddie’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” Richie said, over and over: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” It sounded like “So. Central Rain.”

Richie hadn’t said anything else, and neither had Eddie. He didn’t even tell him it was okay. Some part of him felt that, if he forgave Richie, it would close the circuit, and they would really be done. As long as one of them was sorry, they were still something to each other.

In the morning, Richie somehow managed to leave Eddie’s bed without waking him up. From a person as noisy as Richie, Eddie felt that this amounted to an act of war, and he spent the terrible drive to Boston basically vibrating with icy rage. He didn’t consider, at the time, that maybe this meant Richie didn’t want to close the circuit either.

He didn’t consider it at any point that year, for that matter, or for any of the long years that followed. For some weeks, he didn’t call Richie because he was angry at Richie. Then, for some months, he didn’t call Richie because Richie didn’t call him. After that, he didn’t call Richie because he had started the process of having a life, and he knew it wasn’t one Richie would approve of. Finally, after that, he didn’t call Richie because he’d forgotten there was ever a Richie, or even a person like Richie. 

He didn’t listen to “Pictures of You,” “Nightswimming,” or “Ceremony.” He only really talked to business majors and cross country club team guys, who didn’t tend to remind him of anyone in particular. Quiet, runnerly types with short hair and practical plans: those were safe.

Now, mortifyingly, Eddie bought _Reckoning_ on iTunes. He typed out several texts to Richie, which he didn’t send; instead he texted the Losers group chat, _BGR is the most disgusting airport I have ever seen._ Mike replied with a crying emoji.

He briefly considered starting a secondary group chat with everyone but Richie in it so he could ask them, _Is Richie OK?_ Of course he basically knew the answer to this, but he wanted to be wrong more than he’d wanted anything in 20 years. He also wanted Richie to stop being such a full-throttle prick to him. And, of course, he wanted Richie.

Richie looked fucking terrible. He’d already looked bad at the Jade of the Orient, and things had just deteriorated from there. He looked like he didn’t shave, sleep, get his hair cut, buy clothes, or drink water unless someone threatened him into it, and like no one was around to threaten him into it unless he was about to go onstage. Clearly he was doing a lot of drugs—this was to be expected, because he was not only Richie Tozier but also a celebrity. Somehow, impossibly, he hadn’t gotten Lasik.

Part of Eddie wanted to threaten Richie into shaving, sleeping, getting his hair cut, buying clothes, and drinking water. All of him wanted Richie in literally any condition, terrible or otherwise. He was doing everything he could not to think about it in too much detail, but everytime he remembered something Richie said he remembered how Richie sounded and looked and what his massive fucking hands were doing while he said it, and he felt like his brain was turning into a thin broth.

At least Eddie wasn’t standing in the Jade of the Orient rapid-fire remembering losing his virginity anymore. Now he was about to board a flight home to his wife in Westchester. When he thought about it like that it sounded fucking grim but, really, it was a good thing.

Eddie had expended about 20 stored-up years of bravery over the course of three days. He was clean out. Probably he just felt like shit now because Richie had done his absolute utmost to make him feel like shit, because Richie was not okay and Eddie was there and an easy target precisely because he wasn’t brave. You could provoke Eddie into a lot of screaming, but it was pretty fucking difficult to provoke him into doing something he knew he couldn’t. Richie knew that. The fact that he still went through the motions of provoking Eddie didn’t even have anything to do with Eddie. Richie had wanted to convey to someone that there was something wrong with him, and Eddie had been there and was fun to fuck with besides. Or something. It was as difficult as it had been in high school to reconcile this, which Eddie knew to be true, with the way Richie had called Eddie brave, saved his life, and stared at him like he really did mean something. 

What the fuck was a _gay vibe_ ? The problem with being around Richie for any amount of time was that you inevitably started to buy into the axioms undergirding his deranged worldview. Eddie wanted with terrifying force to make Richie explain again what about Eddie gave off _gay vibes_ , even though he knew this could only end in catastrophe. He wanted to hear Richie talk about anything. He wanted to shove his face against Richie’s collarbone and breathe in. He wanted Richie to actually fucking listen when Eddie said he was a good person, because Eddie _knew_ he was right about this. Eddie couldn’t imagine there was anyone in the world Richie had historically given more shit than him, with the exception of Richie himself, and Eddie still knew it: Richie was a good person. Fuck Richie for not believing him!

Eddie recognized distantly that, if he kept thinking about Richie, he was going to have a panic attack. He blinked hard, pulled at his own hair a little, and opened his mail app.

His most recent email was from Hillary Rodham Clinton. That wasn’t so bad. He archived it.

The next email was marked with three exclamation point. It was from HR.

_Dear Mr. Kaspbrak,_

_I hope this email finds you well. I’m writing to follow up on my previous emails about your employment status. As specified in your contract,_

Eddie scrolled past several messages.

_Dear Mr. Kaspbrak,_

_We are reluctant to terminate your employment after nine years with JP Morgan Chase, but_

A few more messages down:

_Edward—_

_I’m shocked and concerned by_

His phone dinged deafeningly. Why hadn’t it been on silent? Richie had texted a grainy, oversaturated image of Kermit the Frog to the group chat. Bev replied, _if ur just gonna send spoonfed twitter shit don’t even BOTHER trashmouth_ . Richie responded, _FUCK FUCK IM SORRY FUCK._

“I’ve got fireworks and you’ve got rubbing alcohol” entered Eddie’s mind unbidden. It was—sort of clever, as a lyric. For a high-school senior, it wasn’t terrible. Or, well, it was really terrible. But Richie _had_ had a lot of fireworks. It hadn’t just been Eddie’s awful party; they’d set off Roman candles almost every night in the Barrens that year. And Eddie had kept alcohol preps on him even after he’d retired the fanny packs in tenth grade. He’d started putting them in his wallet. Richie had called them “spaghetti condoms,” a nauseatingly evocative phrase that had somehow, at the time, sort of aroused Eddie. It was very disturbing to remember this.

He tried to drown out the memory of Richie singing by playing the album. Stupidly, he didn’t anticipate that the very first chords of “Harborcoat” would make him so dizzy he almost fell out of his chrome-and-pleather chair. “Fuck,” he said aloud. A grim-faced girl with a duffel bag—flying out to college, probably, it was that time of year—shot him a quizzical look. If his experience was anything to go on, it wasn’t often that teenagers in Maine saw Manhattany guys in Bluetooth noise-cancelling headphones exclaiming, FUCK!, in public. “Sorry,” he told her.

 _Home safe,_ Bill texted. Then: _What’s wrong with twitter, Beverly?_

 _bill are u 95? are we ur death panel_ , Richie replied.

Eddie shut his phone off and wheeled his suitcase over to Dunkin’. “Do you have chamomile tea?” he asked. They did. He used it to wash down a Klonopin, burning his mouth badly and spilling on his shirt in the process. 

He turned his phone back on. He had thirty new texts. What the fuck?

One was from Myra. _Do you have your key_?

They’d talked on the phone—not right after Neibolt, but after Eddie had showered and collapsed onto his hotel bed for 14 hours in its wake. Before he called her, he’d written out an outline, the way he did for presentations at work, on the hotel stationary with a hotel pen. Point one: I’m okay. Point two: I’m sorry. Point three: My friend was attacked, he defended himself, and I need to stay until the charges get dropped—which they will, because it wasn’t his fault. Point four: No, really, I’m not friends with an intentional murderer. Point five: I’m sorry, again.

It had gone basically as anyone would have predicted: not well. But Eddie followed the outline, repeated his points, and eventually she agreed that he would stay in Derry for a few more days. Not that she really had any other option, other than divorcing him, which certainly hadn’t come up.

 _Yes,_ Eddie texted her.

The other 29 texts—now even more—were from the group chat. Richie had sent probably ten dollars’ data’s worth of increasingly disgusting images from the internet. Bev had sent fewer, but somehow the ones she did send were even more disgusting. 

Mike had gotten in on it too. The images he sent were not viscerally revolting, but they still didn’t make any sense. Ben and Bill had stopped responding. Stan had said, “BE QUIET FOR TEN MINUTES! I’m talking to my wife”. Richie had responded with an emoji of water droplets, which seemed, to Eddie’s untrained eye, like a gay vibe thing to do. 

**Richie**

Richie could tell it was Stan at his door, because none of the others wanted anything from him and because Stan had always done a soft double-tap with his knuckles, a really obnoxiously calm knock. Like so many things about Stan, it had made him a weird kid and now made him an astonishingly normal adult.

“Hold on,” Richie said, “I’m marking my spot in the Kama Sutra so Bev and I can refer back to it later.”

“Hilarious, Richie,” Stan said kind of dangerously, so Richie reached over to open the door himself, as a nice gesture. 

Stan had changed into a long-sleeved shirt from a charity 5k, and he had reading glasses pushed up on top of his head. He looked so much like a dad. “I’m really wondering how you make that much noise,” he said. “Even more than when we were kids, and you made a lot of noise when we were kids.”

“It’s a gift,” Richie said. “Aren’t you relieved it wasn’t sex noise, though? David Byrne’s way better than sex noise.”

Stan squinted at him. “What?”

Richie made a couple of choice gestures, then said, “be safe,” in the most put-upon-gay-history-teacher voice he could muster. He’d never been able to really do a great Stan—put-upon gay history teacher was the closest thing in his arsenal. Stan had always been able to sigh long-sufferingly without sounding gay in the least, which was a really singular talent.

Now Stan was raising his eyebrows, _still_ looking straight as he did it, what the fuck. “Come on,” he said, “you’re joking.”

“What the hell other than sex would we have to be safe for?”

“You just had to fight a—! Never mind,” Stan said. “I meant, don’t set anything on fire. And, preferably, don’t listen to ‘Psycho Killer’ so loud I can hear it from downstairs.”

“We didn’t set anything on fire,” Richie said.

“What a relief,” Stan said.

“I’m hurt,” Richie said. “Obviously Bev’s like, ninety-ninth percentile hot, and I’m sixtieth percentile ugly, but you could at least assume she has a fivehead fetish or something.”

Stan gave Richie a very even look, like he was public speaking or some shit. Then he sat down in the weird painted rocking chair in the corner of the room. “Richie—there’s something you should know,” he said. “I knew you didn’t have a girlfriend in Bangor, okay? That was not a good lie. You didn’t even have your license. It didn’t make sense.”

Oh, god. “Was this some huge cold case?” Richie asked. “Like, for the past twenty years you’ve been thinking about your friend who said his girlfriend went to a different school, preparing a speech, and now you’re gonna go on _Dateline_ about it?”

Stan was still making the public speaking face. “I’m telling you that I knew you were—”

“Don’t finish that sentence,” Richie said, too fast to be a joke. “I get it now, okay? You know I’m gay, I know I’m gay, everybody wins.”

Stan paused. “Richie,” he said, “I’m not passing judgment on—”

“ _Don’t_ ,” Richie said again, and this time Stan did stop.

It was pretty easy to fill in the rest of that sentence: Stan wasn’t passing judgment on the gay homewrecker everyone was being nice to because he killed a guy. Or—not even homewrecker. Would-be homewrecker. Richie wasn’t bringing anything enticing enough to the table to merit a word as strong as ‘wreck.’ Given everything Richie had recently been proven able to wreck, like a human chest cavity, this was honestly a relief.

Stan had had the misfortune of dealing with Richie when Eddie wouldn’t all through high school. Bill was always drawing and would barely listen when you told him your made-up problems, Mike somehow managed to both take the made-up problems too seriously and make them about ghosts, and Ben was just impossible to get a response from. He’d figure out you were lying and not even say anything about it, just nod and look sympathetic, which was the worst case scenario by far. And Bev was gone. That left Stan, who made an entertainingly huge show of long-suffering and sometimes exploded into gratifying “Richie, can you just shut up!”s when he was trying to read _The Scarlet Letter_ for class or whatever while Richie was talking. When Richie went too far, Stan responded by going too far in his own way, narrowing his eyes and climbing onto his high fucking horse. This was way easier for Richie to deal with than the popular alternative, which was to be actually hurt by whatever Richie was saying. 

Richie was pretty sure he hadn’t even given the Bangor girlfriend a name. He’d mainly said “Just got back from BANG HER, and you know what I did there?” and waggled his eyebrows a lot. The primary function of this girlfriend was to explain Richie’s misery whenever he and Eddie had a real fight. Once, Eddie’d given Richie a visible hickey and gone on some kind of week-long self-abnegation bender, leaving Richie to cry in his bedroom, violently cursing his own blood vessels. Richie hadn’t even embellished the story. He’d asked Stan, “You know my girlfriend in Bangor?” and Stan had said, “I’m actually doing my homework right now,” and Richie had said, “she gave me this hickey—look—” Stan had physically recoiled— “and feels bad about it and it’s like, du—it’s like, babe, it’s _my_ neck, no one even knows it was you—and it wouldn’t _matter_ , because nobody knows you in Derry, so _who cares_ ? And you’re mad at _me_?” Stan had replied, in his flattest, most lifeless monotone, “Your girlfriend probably isn’t mad at you,” and that night Eddie had come over to “borrow Richie’s textbook,” so Stan was basically right.

Obviously Stan had known about them; that Richie had genuinely believed he didn’t was great proof of how dumb a kid Richie had been, how dumb he still basically was now. He didn’t think about it as much as Eddie did. Eddie had been as much of an evil mastermind about whatever he and Richie had going on as he had about stealing from the pharmacy and cheating on tests, his two other major adolescent rebellions. The difference was that, with shoplifting and tests, you got better at circumventing the rules the better you knew them. With trying to make your friends think there wasn’t anything weird going on between you and another guy, there was more of a bell curve—you had to be kind of all over each other, because you’d been best friends since the fourth grade, but you also had to keep whatever measure of distance you’d kept before, which was now extremely difficult to remember. Eddie was not actually great at pretending nothing had changed. He only sat in the hammock with Richie when they were alone or unusually wasted.

“Have you talked to Eddie?” Stan said, finally, because the man was a bloodhound when he wanted to be. 

“In general?” Richie said, faux-nonchalant. He took out his phone to signal that the conversation was over, god dammit. 

_stan didnt think u and i were going up to screw FYI_ , Richie texted Bev.

 _that makes him even more of a prude_ , she replied.

 _actually he just has better gaydar than u :[_ , Richie said.

 _ok that does suck_ , Bev said. Then: _can you tell him sorry i assumed he thought we were being sluts_

_oh he totally thought we were being sluts just platonically_

_platonic sluts, qu'est-ce que c'est_

Richie laughed aloud, a little desperate. _HAHA_ , he texted.

Stan cleared his throat, a soft “hem-hem” sound, and then said “No, not in general. About if Eddie is happy, with his wife and all.”

“Bisexuals fucking exist, Stan.” Richie said, to cover Eddie’s ass and also to finally be self-righteous at Stan—a rare opportunity. 

Stan looked taken aback, then—wow—sheepish. “Did he say—” he started, then broke off. “Well. Sorry I assumed.”

Richie felt a pang of remorse about gaslighting Stan and decided to make backhanded amends. “Speaking of assuming,” he said, “Bev says she’s sorry she thought you were a prude.”

“What, in the lobby?” Stan asked. “Or in high school?”

“Well, you _were_ a prude in high school.”

“Thanks,” Stan said. “Really nice. Apology accepted.”

 _apology accepted but hes being a bitch about it_ , Richie texted Bev.

“Are you calling me a ‘bitch’ in that text?” Stan asked, though he certainly couldn’t see the screen.

This was what happened when you spent time around people who knew you: they could read your fucking mind. “Are you telling me ‘apology accepted’ isn’t bitch language?”

“Everything I say is ‘bitch’ language to you,” Stan said. The scare quotes around bitch were apparent.

“That’s not true,” Richie said. “It wasn’t bitch language when you told us you were alive!”

This was definitely a misstep. Stan looked like he’d been slapped across the face, all the public speaking suddenly gone out of him. “Huh,” he said stiffly. “Right.”

“I’m not, like, being really elaborately a dick,” Richie said quickly. “I mean it. You didn’t sound like—”

“I’m sorry for bailing on you guys,” Stan said. He was staring at the place on the gross carpet where Richie had spilled a Coke Zero that morning.

“That’s not what I’m mad about, dude,” Richie said. “I’m mad that you could’ve died when you tried to die.”

Stan looked at him then. “Okay,” he said. “That’s reasonable.”

“I’m _reasonable_ now? Stanley, what the fuck?”

“I didn’t say you were reasonable,” Stan said. “I said it’s reasonable that you’re mad about that.”

“It’s not about reasonable,” Richie said. “For the record, I’m not reasonable. I didn’t, like, become reasonable over the course of the last twenty years. The bodysnatchers did not invade. I’m mad because of, like, uh.” He wiggled his fingers. “Love and friendship,” he said like Rod Serling.

“I’m not against _love and friendship_ ,” Stan said. He was terrible at all Voices and instead of making an effort just kind of hissed for emphasis. “But. That was the wrong thing to do.”

“I don’t—”

“ _Seriously_ , Richie. It was irresponsible. I was scared and—honestly, it doesn’t matter. I should’ve been there and I wasn’t. Okay?”

“Nope,” Richie said.

“Richie.”

“I don’t care if you’re irresponsible, dick, I care if you’re alive.”

Stan rolled his eyes. “Fine,” he said. “Just—you know I’m here now, right?”

There were a lot of potential asshole responses to that, but Richie suddenly didn’t want to pull any of them out. Stan was staring at the gross carpet again, elbows on his knees. Richie was hit with a wave of profound gratitude that he wasn’t dead. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m fucking glad, man.”

Stan looked deeply annoyed that Richie had yet again made it about his suicide attempt instead of his unflagging emotional support. “Well, me too,” he said.

**Eddie**

Eddie had listened to _Reckoning_ three times through on the plane, falling in and out of terrible hallucinatory sleep the whole time. In the cab, he listened to the top 40 station the driver had on. He knew “One Dance” because they always played it at the gym. It had been a week since he’d worked out, he realized with alarm, then remembered why.

He’d given up on his email and texts. Instead, he opened his mobile banking app and stared at the numbers for awhile. He wondered if Richie ever did this. Presumably, and if he did it was probably as some kind of self-torture. Usually Eddie found it a very soothing exercise, but right now he couldn’t stop thinking about what Richie would say about it if he were next to him in the cab.

It was shocking, how little Westchester was like Derry. The lawns, roughly the same size, looked like they were from another universe. There were no Barrens or clubhouses or Neibolts here, nothing to fear or be brave about at all.

That wasn’t true. Just nine years years ago, Eddie had refused to buy a Tudor-style house because he’d thought doing so might reflect unfavorably on his masculinity. There was plenty to fear, coming back faster the closer he got to his white-sided house with its two-car garage.

Even as the fear came back, though, he remembered that no one was going to die over it. The difference was as big as the difference between the calm of happiness and the calm of sedation. Derry fear was real, and so was Derry courage. No feeling, good or bad, could matter in Westchester; nothing that happened here really happened, or, at least, happened to Eddie. That is, if the Eddie in Derry were the real Eddie at all.

Eddie’d been up twenty hours, during many of which he was waiting for confirmation that the first person he’d ever slept with wasn’t going to prison, so he was too exhausted to try to understand what any of that signified. It was all raw data, as empty as numbers, which meant nothing until you decided to do something with them.

He managed to get his bags inside relatively noiselessly, then carried them, one by one, up the stairs to his room. He felt a rush of relief when he saw no line of light underneath Myra’s door, then felt horribly guilty for it.

 _I’m home,_ he texted the group, after he’d brushed his teeth and washed his face and flossed and changed into his pajama set, which he’d missed in Derry. He gnawed on the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste blood for a second, then texted Richie individually, _Good to see you_ , feeling as he sent it the kind of pure hysterical terror that he used to think became impossible in middle age. 

_you too Edes_ , Richie replied. Eddie squinted at the message for a moment, weirded out by the sincerity as much as the misspelling of his name, then realized that Richie had probably availed himself of the enormous iridescent vape he had kept threatening to bring into court.

Then Richie reacted to Eddie’s message with a heart.

Eddie got up, plugged his phone in across the room, and climbed back in bed. Eventually, he got his breathing under control. By some miracle, it didn’t take long after that for him to fall asleep.

**Richie**

Richie had been back in LA for two months, and he couldn’t decide if it was getting easier or harder. Right now, shivering from the A/C in his miserable lonely apartment, he thought “harder.” New old memories would tear through him, restless and mean from disuse, and latch themselves onto pieces of his life to the point where his possessions were all symbols of lost youth. 

He lay on his couch, crumpled and horizontal, and swigged directly from a bottle of gin. It gave him heartburn. Fuck, he should have sat up to drink, like a normal human being. Richie massaged his chest, and his throat filled with a sudden, searing memory: of being sixteen and drunk in the clubhouse hammock, tangled in Eddie’s legs, facing each other and crackling with lust.

He pointed at Eddie all squinty-like, one finger out like Baba Yaga, and said, “I know you’re gay,” hoping to God that he was right. He was. Richie could feel Eddie’s entire body enter rigor mortis. His eyes flickered from Richie’s face to the wall behind him and back, dizzyingly fast, and his whole face went loose with terror. 

Eddie kept saying, “You don’t have any proof,” which was funny the first time, but then he just kept repeating variations of “How would you know?” in rapid succession, over and over, like a wounded robot. 

Richie told him that he was gay, too. “Collateral,” he said, because Eddie liked collateral. “We’re both gay and we both know, like a Mexican standoff.” Eddie stopped glitching and exhaled shakily. 

“What?”

“I’m gay.”

“Is this a bit, Rich?” 

“A rit bitch?” Shit, shit, spoonerism mistake. Richie did not think before he spoonerized, and now Eddie was sputtering like a deflating balloon, so he said, “Really, genuinely, I am a homosexual, okay?” 

“You fuckin’ lost me, Richie,” he said. Richie realized that he could potentially kiss Eddie Kaspbrak right that minute and felt a strange state of utter reverence which broke into giddy nauseous terror. If he just said, “You want proof?” he could fold over onto Eddie until their faces were inches apart, and then glance down at Eddie’s lips like girls do in movies, and Eddie would kiss him. 

Richie was a fucking stupid kid. 

What really happened was this: He said “I can prove it,” scrambled to reposition himself above Eddie, and just hovered a finger’s width from Eddie’s mouth. 

Eddie flipped the hammock, sending them both spilling out. Eddie caught himself. Richie did not. 

He wanted to say something, but all he could do was lay on the ground and swallow convulsively with his eyes squeezed shut. He would cry if he looked at Eddie. Or spoke. Or moved.

He played dead until Eddie left. He spent the rest of the night wandering through Derry. One temple of his glasses had snapped off in the fall, so he shoved them in his jeans pocket and stumbled blindly. 

Now his phone, lodged somewhere between the futon mattress and its frame, started to buzz. He fished around listlessly, ready to silence it, but when he saw who it was he picked up without thinking, dumb animal instinct.

Eddie’s face, backgrounded by the lit interior of a very nice car, filled the screen. Blue tie, white shirt, gray jacket. The camera angle was such that Richie could see straight up Eddie’s nostrils. Richie was hit, in quick succession or maybe simultaneously, by a wave of tweaky joy and a wave of miserable nausea. 

“Howdy, bitch.” Richie said. 

Eddie squinted at Richie for a second. “Dude, what are you lying on?” he asked.

Richie glanced at his own face in the corner of the screen. A Looney Tunes blanket was draped across the back of the couch. “Your wife’s negligee,” he said. “She must’ve left it here.”

“Ha ha, that’s so fucking funny,” Eddie said. Then, “ _now_ what are you doing?”

“I’m trying to mime hitting a home run without sitting up.”

Eddie rolled his eyes.

“Okay,” Richie said, “so, did you just call because you’re mad I’m fucking your wife, or…”

“That is even less funny than the mom thing,” Eddie said. “I didn’t know that was possible, but apparently it is.”

“I’m definitely gonna make this into a whole thing.” 

Eddie groaned. “Do not do a ‘whole thing,’ Richie, or god fucking help you—” 

“Gird your loins!” Eddie snorted, so Richie kept talking: “Here comes the whole thing!”

“That’s what she—oh my God,” Eddie said.

“ _Eds_ ,” Richie said.

“I don't know what’s happening to me.” 

“Was that a _that’s what she said_ I heard?” Richie said. “What kind of lowbrow comedy is this?” 

“ _Scathing_ review in the _New Yorker_ ,” Eddie said. “I’ll never find work in this town again.”

“It’d be worth it,” Richie said. “Getting roasted by the _New Yorker_ is basically my only career goal. Scathe me, daddy.”

“Did you just call the _New Yorker_ daddy?”

“I’d do it again,” Richie said. “I’d do it every night.”

Eddie laughed through his pressed-together lips, like he couldn't even help it, and Richie felt like some poor village idiot staring directly at an eclipse. 

“Remember when Mike decided he wanted a vampire girlfriend?” Eddie said. Richie remembered. Dealing with a supernatural evil right on the cusp of puberty fucked them all up, but Mike was the only one who took it to the logical extreme and kept believing in all kinds of monsters at 15 years old. He also thought Bill’s dog was a chupacabra. “That was still not as weird as wanting to fuck the _New Yorker_.”

Richie laughed until he was hiccuping on the verge of tears, and kept looking at the proverbial eclipse that was Eddie. He was already half-blind and a glutton for punishment and what the hell. Eddie looked really proud of himself. Richie said, “you’re really fucking funny,” not even ironically, because it was true. Eddie beamed. His teeth were perfect.

It happened a lot, these days: Richie would accidentally let an earnest, honest compliment slip through his teeth before he could swallow it back down. One time he said “I love your laugh,” which was so much like “I love you” that he flinched at the memory. 

The first time they’d spoken after Derry, it had been on a call with everyone else, about two weeks after Richie left. Mike and Bev were about to drive to Florida together, and Mike was asking if anyone needed anything taken care of in Derry before they left. Richie considered telling them to take a selfie in front of his and Eddie’s initials at the Kissing Bridge, just to feel good about themselves in comparison to his total abjection. He was saved only by Ben, who very earnestly thanked them both for asking. Bev said that he’d kept it together OK in the wake of the pussy-magnetism incident. Bill, on the other hand, was pretty much ignoring Bev completely and began every one of his utterances with “so, Mike!” Stan was in the middle of making some kind of soup and kept muting himself so the sound of him chopping vegetables wouldn’t be “distracting.”

Eddie was sitting in what Richie figured was the Eddie version of a man cave: dark wood shelves, a window with fancy blinds, a small cluster of framed photos Richie couldn’t make out. His big leather chair appeared to have spinning capabilities, but he wasn’t wheeling around, just sitting with good posture and his hands clasped in front of him. He was wearing an expensive-looking fleece that pulled tight across his shoulders, and his eyes crinkled when he smiled. The blue stitches in his cheek were out, and the wound was turning into a raised pink line midway between his cheekbone and jaw. It was neat and horizontal, just like his eyebrows and mouth and—Richie knew this—his collarbone.

“Anything you want to see in New York, Mike?” Eddie asked. “We could go to, uh, the Met.”

“Actually,” Mike said, and then rattled off the names of like eight different house museums.

“Huh,” Eddie said, “okay,” and then Bev stopped biting her lip and burst out laughing and it became clear that the two of them were conspiring to fuck with Eddie, which Richie had to support.

“You should take them to the Times Square M&M’s store,” Richie said. “You been to the M&M’s store, Eds?”

“Why the fuck would I ever go to the M&M’s store?” Eddie demanded. “Or Times Square?”

Richie was so overwhelmed with feeling that he had to watch Stan poking around at the stove for awhile to calm down. 

Almost immediately after Mike ended the call, Richie’s screen lit up again. His stomach flipped so hard that he almost dropped the phone as he slid to answer. Eddie was still sitting in the chair, but now he was leaning forward attentively. “Okay, I’m gonna sound like an asshole.”

“Are you calling me back just to say I look like shit, or what?” Richie asked. “Because, seriously, I know. I ran out of shaving cream last week, it’s not my fault.”

“Am I—no, Richie, Jesus Christ,” Eddie said. “I’m just—wait, no. Why don’t you buy more shaving cream?”

“Why anything?” Richie said serenely.

Eddie groaned. “Okay. Well, I was just wondering. Are they together?”

Richie squinted. “Huh?”

“Mike and Bev,” Eddie said. “I thought you’d know.”

“Why’d you think that?”

Eddie raised his eyebrows. “Because they’re doing a cross-country roadtrip, then moving in together?”

Richie tried to figure out what level of fucked up it would be for him to tell Eddie that Bev had already gone through half the straight Losers and didn’t particularly want to increase that fraction. It would be pretty fucked up, he decided, and talking to everyone for two hours had reinfused him with the still-unfamiliar belief that he could occasionally act in accordance with his decisions about what was and wasn’t fucked up. “I don’t think Bev’s trying to do the whole love thing,” he said instead. “And Mike just got out of Derry. It’d be kind of depressing if he didn’t branch out a little.”

“Huh. Yeah,” Eddie said. “That makes sense.”

“I always make sense.”

“I can’t even describe how far that is from the truth.” Eddie was leaning back in the chair, now, crossing his arms over his chest, making that small folded-up smile that always felt like a particular gift for Richie, an allowance. It was almost as good as when Eddie lost control completely and folded over in hysterics, or otherwise just started screaming at Richie. Everything was so good with him.

Richie realized that he needed to say something. For the past week he’d felt again the way he had at 18, holding his breath as he withdrew his arms by increments from around Eddie, nearly vomiting at the site of the packed-up station wagon with its meticulously clean insides, and then vomiting for real a block away. He called the UVM enrollment office that morning and declared definitively that he was not, in fact, going to college, and that he would like a refund of his room and board as soon as possible, please. He knew that this was something they were willing to do, because he’d called once before, disguising his voice, to inquire. Before it had been because he was still holding out hope that Eddie would offer to take Richie with him, that he’d let Richie stow away alongside his graphing calculator and running shorts and then live in his dorm like a ghost. Like Bertha Rochester, basically, but happy. Eddie had never ended up offering.

He used to think slinking away from Eddie felt like murder. It did not. Murder felt worse, but it happened in sped-up time, not the gloopy cold drip of minutes it took to slink from Eddie’s burning view. Afterwards, the blood on his hands was literal, and everybody could see it. Everybody including Eddie. Then as now, Richie’d slunk away from Eddie to hide.

Richie cleared his throat, which wasn’t something he normally did but felt appropriate. “Hey,” he said, “listen—I was an asshole in Derry. I’m sorry.”

Eddie’s eyebrows knotted together. “Jesus, Rich. Don’t be.”

“Well, I was a dick.”

“Who wasn’t?” 

“Nobody else was as much of a dick as I was,” Richie said. “Total category difference.”

Eddie was quiet for a minute, making the face that, in person, Richie usually experienced as the feeling of Eddie applying a scalpel to his stomach, looking at all of his organs, then sewing him back up. Not that this had ever literally happened. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m sorry, too.”

“For _what_?”

“For—” Eddie stopped and exhaled loudly. “For being a dick,” he said. “If you get to apologize, so do I, asshole.”

“Okay, okay” Richie said. “You win.”

“I always do,” Eddie said, automatic.

Richie’s face split into a grin. Also, he got goosebumps. Lest the goosebumps somehow become obvious to Eddie over video, Richie decided to change the topic. “So,” he said, “you’ve never been to the M&M’s store?”

Eddie raised his eyebrows. “I know what you’re trying to do, and it won’t work,” he said. “This is a really stupid bit. I don’t even know what kind of person goes to the M&M store, so there’s no way you can insult me by comparing me to them.”

“What, so you didn’t have those M&M’s with the faces printed on them at your wedding?” Richie asked. “That’s a fucking shock. No, seriously, man, this changes how I see you.”

“I repeat,” Eddie said, a little like he was speaking into a walkie talkie, “this is a _really stupid bit_ ,” and Richie collapsed into hysterics in his huge ugly armchair.

Thus had began the only routine Richie could remember ever having enjoyed in his life: every day, somewhere between 3 and 7 pm his time, Eddie would call him. Through weeks of discussing whether coming out would make his new status as murderer more or less palatable (more, the publicists decided, because it was “important context,” whatever the fuck that meant), then actually coming out, then threatening to quit comedy over and over and being begged over and over to “give it time”—and, through all of this, being resented massively by everyone with whom he had any kind of in-person contact—Richie had exactly one structuring element to his days that didn’t make him want to jump into the Pacific and die there: talking to Eddie.

Steve had locked Richie out of his Twitter account “until you can handle it,” so Richie really had nothing to do all day. He used to half-ass pretending to give a shit about video games in times like these, but now that the world knew he was gay there was no point. Mainly, he was watching cartoons. Once in awhile he would solicit a dick pic from a skinny Grindr brunet, but meeting up was out of the question until everything blew over and he got to leave the traumatic-event A-list. It was pretty much no comfort at all that he was the most famous he had ever been.

When he wasn’t overwhelmed by misery, though, Richie was happier than he’d been since he left Derry as a teenager, maybe even happier than he’d been in childhood. It was because of all of them, but really, obviously, it was because of Eddie. What Richie felt was stronger than lust, stronger than even the distant sad childlike love he felt for him when they were kids. He couldn’t even see Eddie smile at him without plunging into a spiral about how he wanted Eddie to look at him forever. He hadn’t known it was possible to be a creep about emotional intimacy but Richie, perv master general, had accomplished it. 

But Eddie made him so, so happy. Richie was suddenly learning that he could enjoy company in ways that weren’t based in either being not literally alone or observed by a big audience, and he was hooked. Usually being with people was like molly, for Richie, or coke—a high followed by a directly proportional crash immediately afterward, because there was no such thing as free lunch. Except that Eddie was free lunch. He didn’t have to pay for every happy moment with Eddie, which was the sort of something-for-nothing equation that made people tell stories about Merlin. 

He could be with Eddie for as long as he wanted and when Eddie left he didn't even spiral into panic and despair over everything he said. He just stayed that little bit happier. Forever. Like a new layer of nice paint, making everything smoother and uniform and bright with every coat.

In fact, Steve sometimes thought he was high after he got off the phone with Eddie, because he bounced a little when he walked and didn't jiggle his leg when he sat and was a little bit red in the face and genuinely okay. 

Richie did look sort of dazed, he knew, like someone had punched him in the nose but in a sex way. He found himself playing with his hair and laughing sort of gently at things he used to hate, and he didn’t care. Everyone appreaciated that he wasn’t always so manically unhappy that he had to make a dumb joke every three seconds. Richie was less and more alone than he had ever been, and it felt okay. 

Like death by electric chair, of course, but okay.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for homophobic slurs (self-applied by a character) in this chapter

**Eddie**

Eddie didn’t get fired; he got demoted. This was an important distinction. Actually, he just got kicked off the Twilio account and informed that he wouldn’t be receiving a bonus that year, or probably for several years to come. It was made abundantly clear to him that he was getting off easy. No one in the blinds-down meeting seemed particularly moved by the state of his cheek, which was an enormous relief.

His interns were, unfortunately, still there. They seemed extremely moved by the state of his cheek. James, whose moderate competence had led him to the misconception that Eddie liked him, asked if he was okay. Eddie’s response would normally be something along the lines of,  _ That’s incredibly unprofessional.  _ Because his sense of his own personality had recently been obliterated, Eddie instead said, “Yes,” curtly but without any twists of the knife.

Eddie hated interns—it was really foundational to the life he’d built that he hated interns—but these ones weren’t so bad. That is, they were bad, but they weren’t the worst. Eddie’s worst-ever set of interns had been in 2006, one year after he’d started at J.P. Morgan and one before the financial crisis began. For a person as attuned as Eddie was to shit on the verge of hitting the fan, that was more or less the worst possible time to be working at J.P. Morgan, but he and Myra had already bought the house, so there was no going back.

Usually there were two or three redeeming interns out of a class, but in 2006 there had only been one. Her name was Annie, and she went to Barnard. At one point early in the summer she picked up her phone and said, “Emma!” in a bright voice that suggested—well, Eddie couldn’t say for certain what it suggested, about Annie or who Emma might have been to her, but, in any case, Annie’d quickly said, “I’m at work right now, I’ll call you back,” and hung up, which was exactly the right thing to do in that situation, and something almost none of the other interns did. Some of them thought it appropriate to pace the office floor talking to their girlfriends. Of course it was better not to pick up at all, but Eddie didn’t hold it against Annie, as she never made a single mistake on anything she touched. At one point Eddie had asked if she was considering business school, and she’d said she was thinking about a PhD. That, according to LinkedIn, was exactly the route she’d gone, and now she was a postdoc at Princeton.

However, 2006 had also been the summer that Dylan Berg had been an intern, and there was no way to overstate how catastrophic Dylan Berg’s tenure had been. The troubles had started two weeks in, when he looked at Eddie’s bookmarks bar while Eddie tried strenuously to explain that it was generally best practice to Google error codes before wandering over to demand help. “Hey,” Dylan had said, cutting Eddie off mid-sentence, “you watch Rich Tozier? That guy’s funny as hell!”

“Great, Dylan,” Eddie said, “very professional. If you’re not interested in learning how to code today, I’d suggest you clean out your email inbox, and we can give this another try on a day when risk analysis interests you more.” His hands had been shaking a little as he closed the window. He’d seen Richie on Adult Swim and looked him up online, then watched an unsteady camcorder video of his abominable set something like a dozen times in a row. What Eddie wanted to understand was why this man’s jokes about breast implants stuffed with dime bags sent him into such an apoplectic rage. He thought maybe it had something to do with the sexism, but if he was honest with himself that couldn’t possibly explain an emotion of the magnitude he was feeling, given that Eddie rarely felt much of anything about sexism as such. The video quality was so bad he could barely see Richie’s face, which also enraged him, inexplicably.

“Dude, why did you say that shit?” Eddie heard Josh asking Dylan as they walked across the office to go to Shake Shack for the third day in a row. “Do you value your life?” Eddie didn’t hear Dylan’s answer, partly because of the blood rushing in his ears and partly because he didn’t want to.

Dylan continued, inexorably, to ‘say shit’ to Eddie. He started coming in earlier than barely-not-late, apparently just to trap Eddie in the elevator and shout, “Hey, good morning!” at him. Dylan also asked Eddie, “hey, do you want to go to Taco Bell?” at least every other week, even though Eddie responded, each time, that Taco Bell still hadn’t been cleared of  _ E. coli. _

At first, Eddie figured this was some kind of insane holdover from whatever inhuman Pavlovian responses had been beaten into him at Delta Kappa Epsilon rush. He believed that until, one day in August, Dylan asked if he had recommendations for a gym in the Financial District, because, “hey, it seems like you work out.” Eddie had said, “Yes, Dylan, I still have some time left to live, but not enough to wait indefinitely for you to do your job,” and, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Annie wince.

Suddenly it became clear to Eddie that Dylan had not been acting in accordance with anything Delta Kappa Epsilon had taught him, that in fact he was acting in direct and moronic contradiction of everything Delta Kappa Epsilon had taught him, and that Eddie had been brutally shooting down one of the only two gay interns he had ever had,  _ in front of the other gay intern _ , every day for months. Eddie went to the bathroom, where he hyperventilated for several minutes. He considered with horrible clarity the moral disaster of his entire life, then washed his hands, walked back to his desk, and, on the way, said, “hello, Dylan,” neutrally if not pleasantly.

It took less than a day for this plan to become a good person to backfire spectacularly. Dylan, obviously, got the wrong idea. He started biting his lip and looking at Eddie from under his eyelashes while Eddie was trying to explain proper formatting in R to him, and there was nothing Eddie could do to stop him. Also, Eddie was 30, not dead, and Dylan was tall and floppy-haired in a way Eddie responded to instinctively, in addition to being a very accomplished varsity rower. The week before the interns cleared out was one of the most purely, unbearably awkward of Eddie’s life.

Of course, it couldn’t end that easily. Not an hour after he packed up his desk and left, Dylan sent Eddie an email with no subject, reading,

_ Hey, do you want to get a drink? _

_ Dylan Berg _

_ Summer Analyst at JPMorgan Chase & Co. _

_ Yale University, Class of 2007 _

Eddie replied,

_ I wish it surprised me that you think there’s anything appropriate, not to mention ethical, about using someone’s professional email for this kind of attempt at personal correspondence. _

_ EK _

_ \-- _

_ Edward Kaspbrak _

_ Risk Management Analyst, JPMorgan Chase & Co. _

Dylan replied,

_ so is that a yes or no? _

_ DB :) _

_ Dylan Berg _

_ Summer Analyst at JPMorgan Chase & Co. _

_ Yale University, Class of 2007 _

Eddie replied with an email with the subject, “No,” which read,

_ No. _

_ EK _

_ \-- _

_ Edward Kaspbrak _

_ Risk Management Analyst, JPMorgan Chase & Co. _

If there were ever a small mercy in Eddie’s life, it was that they didn’t end up hiring Dylan. Eddie had accepted his LinkedIn invitation, because he thought it would either be homophobic or send up red flags not to, and it seemed like he was at Wells Fargo now, which was just as well.

With no main project to work on, Eddie spent the day answering emails and editing spreadsheets that didn’t actually need to be edited. At lunch, he read through the texts in the group chat. Everyone was home but Bev, who was helping Mike pack up his apartment and kept sending photos of items she deemed “cringe,” like a massive box of fountain pens. Richie found her use of this word really funny and responded to each instance with garbled messages reading  _ HHAHHAHAHAHAAAAHAHA _ or similar. He sent a lot of other garbled messages, too. Not to Eddie, but to the group chat. He hadn’t sent Eddie anything individually since  _ you too Edes _ and the heart.

“How’d it go?” Myra asked when he got home. She was sitting at the dining room table, answering emails. Eddie thought that he and Myra were probably in some very high answering-emails-at-home percentile as a couple, though, considering they lived in New York, that maybe wasn’t true.

“It was fine,” he said. He hesitated. “They took me off Twilio. And—no bonus.”

She winced. “No bonus,” she repeated.

“It’s fine,” he said again. “The credit cards are fine right now.”

“I know,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” Eddie said. “Really, I am sorry.”

“That’s not what—” Myra sighed. “Eddie, what do you want me to say? I’m very relieved you didn’t lose your job, because then we’d lose the house. Is that what you want me to say?”

“We wouldn’t lose the house.”

“Okay,” she said, “we wouldn’t lose the house. I guess that’s what you want me to say. Well, there you go.”

“I’m sorry,” Eddie said again. “I don’t want to fight right now.”

Myra looked at Eddie for a second, then shrugged and turned back to her screen. “Okay,” she said.

Practically speaking, things weren’t any different between him and Myra, but they observed the cycles of fighting and making up the way insomniacs observe normal circadian rhythms. Awake and asleep were almost identical feelings, for them, no matter how dutifully they closed their eyes at night and kept them open during the day. But it was better than inchoate nothing, better than admitting to the half-fight they were always in. Eddie marked the difference between states by apologizing more than usual.

He stumbled around in the shell of his life, half-awake and apologizing, for two weeks. Then he talked to the six of them again, and then he talked to  _ Richie _ again, and it was like a pendulum that had been hovering at its peak was finally tracing a path downward. He started calling Richie every day, compulsively—sometimes just for ten minutes, but he still called him, because on the few days he didn’t, he had trouble falling asleep and felt terrible the next day, the way he did when he didn’t drink enough water. They talked about their friends, derided each other’s homes and cars, and insulted the movies the other professed to like (Richie kept gigglingly arguing that the new  _ Star Wars _ wasn’t that bad, and Eddie kept defending  _ Minority Report _ against Richie’s very mean Tom Cruise impressions). Richie said stupid shit about Eddie’s wife, but not particularly specific or personal shit, and Eddie told him to go fuck himself. Eddie found himself possessed by some really weird demon that made him do exaggerated voices and gestures he hadn’t made since high school. 

Bev and Mike did make a stop in New York, on their way to Florida, where they had tentative plans to buy a houseboat, of all things. Bev had dyed her hair a brittle blond and cut it very short, which did not look particularly attractive to Eddie, but was probably fashionable. Mike looked just about the same, but happier. He kept scrunching his eyes up into a weird small smile, especially when he encountered something particularly bizarre. New York City must be delightful, Eddie thought, for someone as weird as Mike and as accustomed to rural Maine. Mike enjoyed whimsy, it seemed, he just hadn’t gotten access to it in Derry. 

Richie was right. They seemed genuinely platonic—Bev did some goalless flirting, of course, but more directed at Eddie than Mike, who laughed it off with comfort. As the night went on, Eddie started to, as well. 

They went to dinner at a medium-nice Nepalese place, and Bev and Mike pressured him into Shake Shack for dessert. They got milkshakes and were walking after bourbon to put in them when Bev said, “I basically married my dad, when I forgot. Which would be deeply embarrassing to admit to anyone else, but your wife, I mean,” and she did a reasonably cruel fat lady motion with her hands.

“Not all curvy women look the same,” Eddie said. “Honestly, Bev. The fuck?”

Mike chuckled. Eddie suspected he was being laughed at, not with. 

“No, literally, your wife and your mother look the same,” Bev said. “Come on, don’t make me the only fucked up person here.” Her voice developed a dry, sharp edge. “You know it’s true. They could be twins.”

Eddie knew, in the back of his mind, that this was true, but he did not want to talk about it. And yet. “She doesn't act the same, though,” he said. “It’s not like she’s giving me pills or telling me where I can’t go. It’s just marriage.”

“Yeah,” Bev said, “but it’s embarrassing.” 

Bev had sold her engagement ring, but she still wore her wedding band. “To keep guys from hitting on me,” she’d said, but Eddie didn’t quite believe her. 

“Sorry to embarrass you, Beverly,” Eddie said.

Bev laughed. “You are so bitchy,” she said, but with genuine warmth, like she was kind of glad he was bitchy.

They walked around the Village, where Mike and Bev were staying with one of Bev’s friends, drinking their bourbon milkshakes. “I think I’m gonna start a podcast,” Mike said. “On the houseboat.”

“My cooperation is not required,” Bev informed Eddie.

“Yes, it is,” Mike said. “You have to do the fake ads for types of swords.” Bev started doing a bit that Eddie didn’t really get, then, and Mike laughed so hard milkshake came out of his nose.

“Do you have equipment?” Eddie asked.

“You mean, like, life jackets?” Bev smirked at him. “We’ve both beaten you at pool chicken, Eddie, you know we can swim.”

“No,” Eddie said, “I mean audio equipment.”

“Not yet,  _ but _ ,” Mike said, and then he and Eddie had to sit down on a bench for several minutes looking up different microphones, switching phones, saying “nice” and “that’s a great deal,” then switching back. Bev paced around them, occasionally miming barfing.

Eddie told Richie about it afterward, who laughed so hard he doubled over. “God, what an asshole. I fucking love that woman,” he said. “Don’t tell her I said that.”

“That news would definitely shock and disturb her,” Eddie said.

He started to do things he recognized as dumb. He took the train to work and came in with his suit wrinkled from other bodies’ sweat. When he drove, he played music turned all the way up— _ Disintegration _ ,  _ The Queen is Dead _ ,  _ Slanted & Enchanted _ , and  _ Reckoning _ —even when he was driving through Midtown and could see pedestrians turn to face him, irritated at the noise. He ran too hard some days and didn’t run at all others. At one point, he made a burner account on Reddit, got halfway through writing a legal advice question about no-fault divorces with a closeted spouse, then deleted the account. Still, he read through other people’s questions about no-fault divorces with a closeted spouse. He also ate cashews with no repercussions.

There was also the overarching dumb thing of talking to Richie so much. The risk-reward of this particular dumb thing was vastly different from that of all the others, because, with Richie, both were so absurdly high Eddie couldn’t even quantify them.

One Monday afternoon in late October, Eddie was distracting himself from his unusually bad Pret salad by scrolling through the  _ New York Times _ app. He had read all of the most offensive of the day’s op-eds and was going to start on the bad lifestyle tips when he accidentally hit the Arts section tab.

“Rich Tozier Redraws the Line,” the headline read. There was a photo of Richie sitting on a high wooden stool, mic cord looped around his finger the way he used to twist the wire on his landline. Eddie heard himself make a sharp squeaky noise, and he tapped the link.

Richie wasn’t walking around the way he usually did in a set. His elbows were on his knees, his feet braced against the stool’s spindle. Horrifyingly, he was wearing a cable-knit sweater. “This isn’t a funny set,” he said. “This is the equivalent of, like, how Sesame Street stealth teaches kids the alphabet by distracting them with hilarious puppets. I’m the hilarious puppet here, and the alphabet is… homosexuality. I’m gay. Yeah, I heard those gasps. I would’ve been  _ thrilled _ about those gasps in high school. Seriously, though, this is not me kidding. I’m a full-on homosexual. Just transpose all the sexploits you’ve heard about into cabs with guys who didn’t bother to take off their wedding rings, and you’ve basically got a sense of my life. Think of that in your dreams.”

Had Richie told Bev about this? Had he told Stan? Had he—Eddie tried to remember what he’d said when they’d spoken, just for a few minutes, the day before. It had been early afternoon Richie’s time, and he kept pausing his video and then saying “hold on, sorry, got a text,” but that was pretty normal. He had looked maybe a little queasier than usual, but Eddie assumed he was just hungover.

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” Richie continued. “I’m not putting myself on the market here, I’m just trying to convey how much spelling actually sucks so you don’t get too excited about it. The guy I hooked up with in high school pretty much saw me as a really mildewy, poorly-constructed sex doll. Like, a blowup doll with a tear in the foot that someone fixed with a chewed-up wad of Nicorette. Which,  _ to be clear _ , I’m totally down for! If anyone needs a poorly-constructed sex doll, DM me. Anyway, this guy I deluded myself into thinking was my boyfriend in high school basically went and became Christian Grey, except without the BDSM, I think, but I’m not actually sure. We talked and it was like watching someone remember they left the stove on. Like: oh, fuck,  _ what I do _ ? Realistically no one’s having sex dreams about me, everyone’s having stress dreams about their houses burning down because they set their standards just a little too low when they were seventeen.”

That was the end of the video. There was a short article, too, but Eddie had no interest in reading it. He threw away the rest of his salad and then, with murder in his heart, called Richie.

Richie was in bed. Given that it was 10 am in LA, this wasn’t surprising; more surprising was that he’d picked up at all. He was wearing neither his glasses nor a shirt. His whole face was scrunched up, eyes almost shut. “Mmmyello?”

“I just watched your new set,” Eddie said.

Richie squinted at the screen for a second. Then his eyes closed. Then he leaned over, his shoulder and chest and armpit briefly and blurrily filling the screen. Eddie heard something crash to the floor, but Richie didn’t comment on it. When he reappeared, he had his glasses on, and his face was white as a sheet. He grinned, but it was one of his horrible wobbly grins, the face he made when he was about to puke. “Yeah?” he said. 

“Richie, are you—” Eddie started. His voice broke, and he tried again. “Did you—I mean. What the hell?”

“Yeah,” Richie said, “so, the thing is, Eds: I’m gay.”

“You’re not fucking funny,” Eddie said quickly. Richie’s face wavered, and Eddie regretted it, but there was no way to take it back, especially because he was still  _ enraged _ . “You…” He forced himself to inhale, then exhale. “I did not think  _ oh, fuck, what did I do _ , you fucking asshole,” he said. “I call you every day.”

“I wrote that a week after I got back,” Richie said. “It’s standup. It isn’t adjusted for breaking news.”

“Talking every day for two months means it’s a different situation than the one you describe.”

“Yeah,” Richie said, “again, I was talking about pussy-eating technique in my set before this one, so, I’m not really reporting the facts here, generally.”

“Okay,” Eddie said. “Well, sorry. I don’t work in comedy—actually, I don’t work in a creative field at all. I work at a bank. So, I guess I’m just having trouble understanding, because I’m such an idiot, why you decided to do a set about this at all.”

“I needed an excuse for not coming out on a normal timeline for a human being in 2016,” Richie said. “Okay? It isn’t a big deal.”

“Your excuse is that you’re pathetic and I got really rich and hot?”

Richie started laughing. “Uh, thanks, man.”

“I’m repeating what  _ you said _ !” Eddie said. “I’m obviously not, fucking, I’m not  _ Christian Grey _ and you’re not—fuck.” He groaned aloud. “Glad I’m a good excuse, at least. I’ve always wanted to be an excuse. What a relief.”

“Dude,” Richie said, and sighed. “You were never an excuse.” He went somehow paler. “And I’m not what?” he asked. “I’m not a homosexual? I’m not a blow-up sex doll?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said, “you’re actually a person, last I checked.”

“That’s really nice, Eddie,” Richie said. “Are you gonna tell me it’s okay to make mistakes and that my feelings are valid? Is that what comes next? Is everyone gonna clap after?”

Eddie wasn’t hyperventilating, but there was a lump in his throat. “God,” he said. “What the fuck, Richie?” He looked at the woodgrain of his desk so he wouldn’t have to see Richie’s face anymore.

For a moment, Richie didn’t say anything. Then he started talking again, a little softer. “Look,” he said, “I got Bev to tell Mike that the set’s about Luke Hannity. So, Mike’ll tell Bill, and,” he waved his hand, “you know, word spreads, nobody’s gonna find out we were banging.”

“ _ Luke Hannity _ ?” Eddie demanded, then realized that wasn’t anywhere near the worst part of what Richie had just said. However, Luke Hannity was not only an asshole, and ugly, but had also beaten Eddie’s three-kilometer time in junior year, which basically torpedoed any chance Eddie had had at an athletic scholarship.

“Yeah, I’m throwing Luke Hannity under the bus, which is pretty morally questionable, but,” Richie inhaled, hard. He was babbling, brows furrowed, shaking slightly. “But hopefully nobody is gonna turn out under the bus, and if someone is, it can’t be you. I wouldn’t—” 

“That’s not what I—I didn’t even think about that,” Eddie said, which, shockingly, was true. He hadn’t even considered caring that everyone might know it was him. This realization—not that everyone might find out, but that Eddie cared so little whether they did—was what finally made him start hyperventilating.

Richie said, “There were always people who knew, you know,” like that was an apology. It kind of was, because this was harder to say. “People who could smell it on me.” He looked down at his naked chest, screwed up his face, and made the opposite of eye contact with Eddie’s hairline. “There was a squadron of people on Twitter who were betting on ‘Richie tozier is a self-hating fag,’ so. They got some money, I guess.”

Eddie was scared for Richie. It had been such a long time since he’d been really scared for someone other than himself that he’d almost forgotten what it felt like, and then he’d been scared for all of them, and now he was so scared for Richie that he really thought he might cry for the first time in something like ten years.

It was a pain so big he couldn’t feel anything else, like a shattered bone in the arm or a cheek with a knife still sticking out of it. It was the kind of pain that gave you adrenaline so you wouldn’t give up on the spot, betrayed utterly by life for making you feel it. “I’m coming to LA,” Eddie said.

Richie blinked. “You can threaten to kill me all you want,” he said, “but, seriously, you’re wasting your time, I’m gonna be dead of natural causes within like ten years anyway.”

“I’m not— _ fuck _ you,” Eddie said. “I’m not threatening to kill you, I’m buying a plane ticket. I’m coming to stay with you.”

“So you can kill me in my sleep?”

“Because I’m worried to death over you, you fucking dick,” Eddie said. 

“Uh,” Richie said, “what?”

“Do you have a guest bedroom or no?” Eddie asked. He’d opened up Expedia. “Should I stay with Bill or get a hotel?”

“You’re—come on, man.”

“Answer the question.” Eddie was taking the credit card they used for flying out of his wallet. “I’m getting in on Friday, 9:30 at night, your time. Do you have a guest bedroom?”

“Eds,” Richie said, “seriously.”

“I’m pretty serious,” Eddie said. “This isn’t a hard question to answer.”

“I have a guest bedroom. But—”

“Great,” Eddie said, “so I won’t have to stay somewhere else.”

“You’re not actually buying a ticket.”

“Actually, I am.”

“At least—dude, I have frequent flyer miles, at least use my card.”

“I have frequent fucking flyer miles too,” Eddie said. “Okay. You better pick me up from the airport on Friday. I leave Sunday morning.”

“No, you don’t,” Richie said. “You’re fucking with me.”

“I forwarded you the confirmation.” He heard Richie’s phone ding. “That’s the confirmation,” he added.

Richie just stared at him, silent for maybe the first time in his life.

Eddie had to get back to work, but before he did that, he texted Myra,  _ My friend in LA is having a personal emergency. I need to fly out this weekend. I’m sorry. _

_ What? _ she texted, then called him. He picked up on the fourth ring. “Eddie, what are you talking about?” she asked.

“It’s—you know the comedian?”

“Yes,” she said slowly.

Eddie realized this context didn’t help at all. “He’s having a hard time,” he said. “Um. I’m worried about him.”

“You’re worried about him,” she repeated.

“He’s—on drugs,” Eddie said, though this wasn’t really the issue, and Richie was pretty much on drugs in the manner of a college kid, which was concerning but much better than being on drugs in the traditional manner of a middle-aged man. “He’s just really, really not doing well. I—Myra, I wouldn’t do this if it weren’t serious.”

“Well, that’s good to hear,” Myra said. “It seems like everything has been very serious for the past few months, hasn’t it? Except your family, or job?”

“What do you mean, my f—” Eddie started, then broke off.

Myra made an incredulous sound. “You’re joking,” she said. “What do I  _ mean _ ?”

“I didn’t mean that,” Eddie said.

“Well, I see that you bought the ticket,” Myra said. “Oh, eight hundred dollars!”

“Myra—”

“I’m wondering why you texted me. Obviously it wasn’t to ask. So, just to let me know? Was it that urgent?”

“You called me,” Eddie said. “I didn’t—it wasn’t my intention to interrupt you. Really. I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry for  _ that _ !” Myra said, and hung up.

At least the interns weren’t around to see him put his head on his desk.

**Richie**

Eddie was coming at 9:30. Nine-thirty tonight. Richie looked around at his fucking odious apartment and nudged a furry slice of pizza with his foot. He would have to clean before Eddie arrived, that was for damn sure, and shower, and shave, and do laundry, and wear something decent. Maybe even buy something decent. He collapsed back onto the couch and opened his Twitter, the login of which he had wheedled out of Steve with Schrodinger’s-seriousness suicide threats, searching out the most scorchingly horrible tweets about himself. He also got a fair number of death threats, which weren’t usually particularly insightful in their cruelty, but made up for it in creative violence. 

Richie was more fine with creative violence than with what people were saying about his own awfulness—his cowardice, his obvious lonely self-hating faggotry, his personally extinguishing a human life and then coming out right after, his abject unfuckability—which said something bad about the state of his soul and his ego. He looked back down at the furry pizza slice. Good fucking god, would Eddie be disgusted. He imagined Eddie’s face wrinkled up in revulsion, and he needed a distraction painful enough to work, so he had several consecutive beers and went back to Twitter. Lots of people thought he wasn’t funny. They also thought he had an incredibly gay way of moving his shoulders. 

And then it was dark outside. He showered, shotgunned a Coke Zero, and stared in dismay at his enormous quantity of shit, most of which was draped across purpose-designated armchairs (“vinyls armchair,” “shirts armchair,” “sex toy behind-armchair corner nook”, etc.). He looked frantically through his drawers, but all of them were already full of the stuff that hadn’t fit into one of the armchair categories, like CBD gummies and batteries. The only empty space in his whole apartment, it seemed, was about three square feet of closet space and the cabinet underneath his sink, which had nothing in it but an unopened new pack of sponges. Richie realized what he had to do: he threw away the sponges, packed in as much of the armchair-contents as he possibly could, and slammed the cabinet door, grateful when the child-lock latched it shut. Then he threw the pizza off the balcony and ran out of the apartment, barely remembering his car keys.

He managed to get to the airport on time and waited for Eddie entertaining himself with the absurd thought of making one of those little cards that read “Eddie Kaspbrak,” like Eddie was an international spy and Richie’s mission was to pretend to be his wife. 

Eddie grabbed the doorframe of Richie’s car and swung in, in a very subdued but smooth way, which was probably the sexiest thing Richie had ever seen. “Hey,” he said. He unzipped his puffy jacket, then shrugged out of it, his shirt riding up. Richie caught a brief glance at smooth hard muscle above his belt before looking away. Then Eddie turned to Richie, one arm outstretched. “I’m disgusting,” he said. “That airport has terrible temperature control.”

“You’re wearing a parka in southern California, man,” Richie said, and returned the tight quick side-hug Eddie was offering.

“It’s late fall, of course I’m wearing a fucking parka,” Eddie said. “The least LAX can do is adjust its temperature to the international norm.”

“The  _ international norm _ ,” Richie said, “isn’t that a little—”

“Fuck you—”

“—so you’re saying New York is the center of the—”

“I’m going to strangle you with my parka,” Eddie said matter-of-factly. “Also, Richie, this is a stupid car.”

Richie’s car was a BMW convertible with a color the dealership had called ‘cadmium.’ Eddie was totally right, which was the point. “I’m a stupid man,” Richie said. “It’s like the batmobile. I’ve been having a midlife crisis my whole life, it’s become my superpowered alter ego.”

“I don’t get it,” Eddie said.

“Like, batman has the batmobile, stupid man has the stupidmobile,” Richie said. “I have a stupid signal.” He threw up deuces to demonstrate.

Eddie laughed.

“You have one, too,” Richie said, giving him a therapisty over-the-glasses look. “Everyone does.”

“A superpowered alter ego?”

“No, a midlife crisis.”

“Hilarious,” Eddie said, but he was too distracted by the quality of Richie’s driving to get mad. “Why are you going  _ so slow _ ?” he asked. “This is the fast lane. You’re—just—” He started reaching over for the wheel.

“ _ No _ ,” Richie said, making a shield with his shoulder, “you are  _ not _ drivers edding me right now,” and then Eddie said “don’t you  _ dare _ ” just as Richie shouted, triumphantly, “DRIVER’S EDS!”

“You’ve made that joke so many times,” Eddie said. “Well, joke is generous. You’ve said that so many times. I mean, constantly, for years. You recycling material now?” Suddenly, his ears turned so red that Richie wondered if he was losing circulation in his toes. Every time Eddie had tried to teach him how to drive—there had been many—Eddie had gotten so ridiculously turned-on that he would start shouting “stop doing that, it is  _ broad daylight! _ ” whenever Richie so much as looked at him. Stan ended up having to finish the job, in Rabbi Uris’s minivan, after duct-taping over the radio so Richie couldn’t fuck with it.

“You know I am,” Richie said. “I have to, instead of using my new infinite gay joke opportunities. Fuck, I can make as many gay jokes as I want. I feel like it’s the nineties again.”

He worried for a second that Eddie would think it was a jab, which he genuinely hadn’t mean for it to be, but Eddie just looked at him. Richie was watching the road now, like the good responsible driver he still wasn’t, but he could  _ feel  _ Eddie’s serious gaze. “Speaking of,” Eddie said, “are you okay?”

Richie swallowed and didn’t look at Eddie. “On the hierarchy of needs I’m at short Wall Street freak in my car,” he said. “Wolf of Small Street.” Richie tried not to laugh at his own joke. Eddie glowered. “Which is pretty high up. Like, self-actualization level. So, yeah, I’m doing fine.”

There was a terrible silence.

“Also,” Richie said, “your superpowered alter ego is norm-man. You drive a norm-mobile.”

“Norman is already a word,” Eddie said. “Like the Vikings.”

“Or Norman Bates,” Richie said, and started sloppily whistling “Psycho Killer.” Eddie’d left before the convocation of the Derry Manslaughter Club and deserved to hear what he’d \missed.

Eddie groaned. This time, he was the one who turned on the car radio. “Floridada” started playing very, very loudly, because Richie had been listening to  _ Painting With _ , a soothingly stupid album, to calm himself down. Eddie goggled at him, so Richie started singing along to all ten parts at once. “How are you even doing that,” Eddie muttered, “I—”

“FLORIFLORIFLORIFLORIDAAAH FLORIDAH-DAH FLORIDAH-DAH,” Richie sang.

“Your head is screwed on the exact opposite of the way it’s supposed to be,” Eddie said. He took his phone out of his pants pocket, which required pelvic wriggling, which required Richie to divert his eyes from the road. Luckily, Eddie was too distracted by the phone to notice. He frowned at it and typed very quickly with both thumbs. 

Richie was struck by the nauseating urge to ask if everything was okay, which he obviously couldn’t do, so he switched to “Leaf House” to further incense Eddie.

Eddie glanced up at him. “What the fuck is this music?” he asked, sounding distracted but like himself. 

“Animal Collective,” Richie said.

“Like  _ Animal Farm _ ?”

Richie didn’t know how to respond to that. He tried to suppress a laugh, and failed, so it came out a snorting orc sound. “I mean, probably,” he said. “Like, that's probably the inspiration.” That was really smart, actually. Fuck, Eddie was so smart, even when he wasn’t trying to be. “That’s actually really smart. Like, I never thought about that, but it’s definitely true.”

Eddie grinned. “Thanks, dude,” he said.

“No problem, bayuube,” Richie said, and then tensed. Eddie laughed, thank god. Thank god almighty, honestly. 

They arrived at Richie’s apartment much sooner than expected—the drive seemed to last only a few minutes. Time flies, Richie guessed. Richie made microwave nachos while Eddie put his suitcase in the guest bedroom. He didn’t say anything about the state of the apartment, probably because it didn’t look that bad. It  _ looked bad _ , that is, but not particularly bad for a notoriously disgusting guy who’d faced a traumatic clown monster and came out to an enormous audience within a span of three months. It had looked bad even for someone in that position before Richie’d shoved everything into the closet and cabinet, but now it was fine.

They sat against the kitchen island, talking around the nachos. Eddie sat on the stool that had been broken for at least five years now, tilting it back and forth, worrying at it like a loose tooth. It made an absolutely bone-chilling rhythmic squeaking, which Eddie seemed to enjoy.

“That is literally the worst sound, Eds,” Richie said. “Eldritch horrors make that noise to communicate.” 

Eddie laughed and twisted on the stool, squeaking it harder. “It’s the Call of Cthulhu!” He had to shout over the squealing metal. Fucking nerd.

Richie rolled his eyes back in his head and pretended to be possessed. He flopped out of his chair, bending his hip unpleasantly in the process, and shrieked, “We are but ants to God!” Eddie  _ squeak squeak squeak _ ed his chair. 

It broke. Eddie went careening into the nachos, and emerged over the edge of the counter giggling, waggling his cheesy elbows. There were chips attached. Eddie flung one onto Richie; he tried to catch it in his mouth, but it was kind of hard on the floor, and it landed in his hair.

Richie was still on the floor when Eddie stood, very businesslike (cute) and competent (unbearably sexy), and declared, “I’m going to fix it!” He started briskly rifling through Richie’s kitchen drawers, most of which were pretty much empty. Then, too fast for Richie to object, he flung open the cabinet beneath the sink. With a crash and a swoosh, Richie’s junk flooded out around his ankles. 

Richie braced himself for Eddie’s lips to retract from his teeth and his head to jerk backward, totally disgusted by all that Richie was and had been and ever would be. That was how it used to go when he would walk into Richie’s childhood bedroom and trip, in quick succession, on a radiator-melted rain jacket speckled with flecks of puke, the  _ Dog Day Afternoon  _ poster Richie jerked off to, and an open container of cloves Richie had never ended up smoking. 

Instead, Eddie just made a sharp, whistling laugh through his nostrils and said, “Richie, what the fuck is this, a cartoon?” He kneeled, then lifted the CARTER 1976 iPhone case Richie had bought a few years ago close to his face and squinted. “This isn’t a real item,” he said.

He didn’t look disgusted. He looked really, really confused, but not disgusted at all.

“Uh, real in what sense,” Richie said, pushing up on his elbows. He scooted over to start picking through the stuff. He found an unopened pack of boxers and a jar of green curry, which he put in a newly-designated “unclear whether a normal person would throw this away” pile. Then he realized that he had—not a normal person, but, close enough—at hand to ask. “Hey,” he said, “would a normal person throw this away?”

“Who  _ makes _ this?” Eddie asked. “Did Jimmy Carter make this?”

“Wait ‘til you see the Nixon one,” Richie said. “Do you need—uh.” He’d been about to offer the boxers to Eddie, then realized that if he did this he’d have to kill himself immediately afterward. “Do you need this?” he finished, and held up the curry instead. “Or, actually, you can have the phone case.”

“I don’t want a Jimmy Carter phone case,” Eddie said, but he did so while cradling it like a baby bird.

“Seriously,” Richie said, “you’re gonna love the Nixon one,” and he went to get the They Can’t Lick Our Dick case, which was for an iPhone 4 and even funnier because it was obsolete, from his pants drawer, where he was pretty sure he’d left it. When he came back, there was a neat pile of stuff to one side of Eddie, a few bags of trash to the other. “Can I throw this away?” he asked, gesturing to the “unclear whether a normal person would throw this away” pile.

“Uh, dude, you don’t have to do that,” Richie said. “I didn’t booby trap my kitchen so you’d have to clean up my shit.”

“I don’t have to do anything,” Eddie said. “You, on the other hand, don’t have a choice whether I clean up your shit, just which of it I throw out.”

Richie’s internal organs liquified. “Okay, okay. Yeah, you can throw everything away, I don’t give a shit.”

“I’m not throwing this away,” Eddie said, waving an unopened immersion blender in the air without turning to look at Richie. He was totally absorbed in the task, the way he was in every task. He was so fucking thorough. Richie was struck by the thought of Eddie making immersion-blended smoothies in his apartment every morning. He fantasized about waking up to the imagined whir of blending fruits and vegetables, which was a first. Richie rarely looked forward to waking up at all.

“Do you make those awful things where you sneak spinach into a smoothie?” Richie said.

“You're damn right I do.” Eddie plunked some empty bottles into a garbage bag. “It’s not sneaking it in, you're the one doing it. And it's good for you.”

Eddie was insane. “You’re insane.” Richie told him, and he laughed. 

“I mean,” he gestured at the bags of garbage, “look who’s talking.”

“You are!” Richie fought the urge to say  _ I love you.  _ “You’re the one who’s talking!”

“Really?” Eddie said. “Really? Because it sounds like you’re talking now.”

Richie groaned and fell further onto the floor, dissolving into a puddle, and said, “No, no, no, no. I am not falling into this particular self-destructive cycle, okay, I have standards.” Eddie laughed.

They ended up with two bags of shit in Richie’s kitchen to throw away, plus his regular garbage. It had started raining around midnight. “Jesus Christ,” Richie said. “Eds, you  _ made _ LA cold.”

Eddie grinned. “You don’t know what I’m capable of,” he said, which went ahead and vaporized Richie’s already-liquid insides. Then he hoisted the two heavy bags and jerked his head at the tiny trashcan. “You get that one,” he said. 

Richie didn’t know whether to focus on the fact that Eddie had no problem taking out Richie’s trash or the fact that Eddie was bossing him around into taking out his own trash. “Did you just come here to train for a second career as a bitchy schoolmarm?” Richie asked. “I feel like you’re getting something out of this.” He grabbed his keys off the island and yanked the overstuffed bag out of the can. “You sure you don’t want a rain jacket? I have this really fucked up trenchcoat you can borrow.”

“I don’t want to wear something someone died in,” Eddie said, stepping past Richie, who held the door open.

It was pouring out. Richie glanced at Eddie—he’d always hated getting really drenched, and he was in sneakers and a T-shirt, which were already soaked. The T-shirt especially. It clung to the contours of his chest and stomach like he was in some gay parody of  _ Flashdance _ .

“Actually,” Richie said, “you’re a British nanny. Like Mary Poppins. That’s how you got those garbage bags. I don’t even think I own garbage bags.” Eddie’s whole body was made of sharp corners and hard surfaces. Even his nipples. Oh, Jesus god, Richie was so fucked. “Wet T-shirt contest!” Richie exclaimed, giggling maniacally. 

Richie tried to leap and click his heels, and his heels clicked pretty successfully, but he did not land successfully, slipping and skittering in the mud for what felt like thirty minutes before falling directly on his face. It stung like a motherfucker, all over the left side of his body but especially his cheek, and Richie felt stupid and sixteen again, on the verge of tears in the mud, but this time Eddie made a soft click with his tounge against the back of his throat and helped Richie up. 

“Oh no,” Eddie said, “you broke your glasses.” Richie slapped a muddy hand around his head and, yep, they were broken.

Richie felt like the fall had stripped him of two and a half decades. The years sloughed off him, carried away by rain, and he was still awkward and horny and sad. He felt like a frog being vivisected, skin torn and splayed out in sheets nailed to a corkboard, heart beating fast for everyone to see. There was mud in his eyelashes. He could barely make out Eddie pulling off his own shirt by the back of the neck like a pornstar and gently-firmly using it to rub the mud from Richie’s face. 

And then they were running, running through the hammering blades of rain, and Eddie grasped Richie’s wrist like he did when they were kids, and it occurred to Richie that Eddie might feel young and scared and full of screaming glee as well. Eddie’s hand slipped, fingers stiff from the cold, and Richie caught it for just a second, long enough for Eddie to grab his wrist again. Richie grabbed Eddie’s freezing knobby wrist back, and they went forward through the storm, linking arms like mountain climbers. Even paps wouldn't go out in this weather. They were safe together, really safe, for the first time ever. Richie wanted to whoop and pick Eddie up and kiss him and rent a small plane to fly a banner that read TOZIER-KASPBRAK CIVIL UNION, but he did not. He just held onto Eddie’s wrist and followed his blurry triangle of a body to absolutely nowhere and back. 

**Eddie**

Eddie woke up at 7 am, which felt to him like 10 am, after about four hours of dreamless sleep. He was deliriously tired but beatifically happy, which confused him until he looked around at the room he was in and remembered it was Richie’s.

His apartment really wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t clean, but all the overflowing stuff was Richie’s stuff, which Eddie felt very differently about than he did about other people’s stuff. In the guest room, there were three Pavement posters in cheap dusty frames, an overstuffed bookshelf, a glass desk littered with capless ballpoint pens and water-damaged legal pads, and, shockingly, a stationary bike. The bed was actually a hideous futon, with a navy blue duvet and black sheets mismatched with the gray pillowcase. It was really, genuinely funny that Richie lived like this despite being famous.

Feeling insane, Eddie pushed his face into the pillowcase. It didn’t smell like Richie, but it did smell like his detergent, which was sort of close.

Eddie hadn’t slept this little in one night since Derry, and before that it had been something like 15 years. He’d started having trouble sleeping in business school, and then he’d gotten an Ambien prescription, and from then on he’d never had the particular desire to be awake for more than two-thirds or so of his life. Now he found that he bizarrely regretted having gone to bed at all, even though he was still so tired that, if he stared at the posters too long, the shapes got warped and three-dimensional.

He’d slept in just briefs, also for the first time in something like 15 years, with the demented 3 am idea that Richie might need to talk to him and walk in and—what? Well, see Eddie in just briefs. There was probably something really ethically dubious about this whole scheme, not, obviously, that it had come to anything. Last night Eddie had decided that it would be  _ really  _ ethically dubious to jerk off in Richie’s shower, and this was the compromise he’d arrived at with himself: he could entertain his stupid fantasy of Richie seeing him naked as long as he didn’t jerk off in Richie’s shower. He actually hated sleeping shirtless, but he’d been so giddy and exhausted last night it hadn’t mattered.

It would be easy to say he felt like a teenager, but that wouldn’t really be true. Certainly he’d spent his adolescence battended about by biting gusts of Richie-centric sexual lunacy, feeling like he was holding an umbrella in a storm every time the light hit Richie a certain way in homeroom, but he’d never had this many feelings  _ at once _ , all ringing in his ears at radically different frequencies. It was the old high-pitched and constant desire to be as close to him as possible, now with a bassline of something warm and steady. This made everything before bald and sepia-toned in comparison. Sometimes, like now, he felt so crazed with affection that he wanted to burrow into Richie’s chest like a guinea worm, and the rest of the time he just wanted to hold him and be held. He was haunted with lakeside scenes of them on a couch, fucking  _ cuddling,  _ and he let himself imagine them because they made him feel less terrible about the grey hair sprouting from his ears of late.

_ Christian Grey,  _ he thought ridiculously. More like Dorian Grey. His collapsing body was cryofrozen, for now, but it was all going to catch up with him or someone else eventually. 

He unfroze his joints and whisper-shouted through the door: “Richie, are you up?” No response. He padded, in his underwear, across the apartment to the shower. Eddie took a cold one. 

Eddie walked around in a towel, for a time, until he realized that Richie probably didn’t wake up during the morning. It was noon when Richie stumbled out of his bedroom in novelty Simpsons boxers prominently featuring Smithers and a shirt with so many holes across the chest that the no-doubt awful graphic was obscured. “Damn,” he said, “should’ve guessed you were a morning person.” Eddie was still grappling with the coffee maker.

“This thing is a death trap,” he said, trying with limited success not to stare at Richie’s dick. It was significant. He had never thought he’d describe another man’s penis as significant, even in his mind, but there he went. Significant. “I’ve been up for five hours,” he said, and looked very determinedly at the evil, probably-haunted coffee maker.

“Smithers?” Richie said, literally pointing at his crotch, because he probably saw where Eddie’s eyes were pointed and honestly, fuck him. “You remind me of him.” Eddie’s hand shook a little bit, rattling the insides of the coffee maker, which Richie seemed to take for anger. “Smithers, I mean,” he said hesitantly. 

Eddie said, “Who did you think I thought you meant, your penis?” More snappish than usual, he realized, because Richie went to sit down on the remaining intact stool. 

“Sorry,” he said. “Do you want me to put some pants on?”

“No, I’m sorry. I just—I feel like I haven’t slept in a week, can you please show me how to make coffee in this thing?”

“Honestly, I have no idea.” Richie scrabbled around for his glasses. Eddie moved them near his fingertips, very carefully, without touching his hand. “You wanna figure it out?” 

Eddie had a vision of Richie’s apartment building burning down, all the celebrities flooding out, and said, “What the fuck do you drink in the morning, then?”

“Cordyceps,” he said. “In lukewarm water.” And he held up a glass of water that looked like someone had shat in it. 

“Gross,” Eddie said, snatching it out of his hand. It tasted like someone had shat in it, too. 

“You want breakfast? You want crepes?” Richie started snapping his fingers and advancing toward Eddie. “Ya want breakfast, ya want crepes,” he sang, stumbling sideways and back like a drunken crab. “Just kidding, I don’t know how to make crepes.” He reached into the abyss of a cabinet and clatteringly withdrew a cast-iron frying pan. “But do you want pancakes?” 

“Actually, I’d love pancakes.” Eddie could feel himself smiling, aching with it. It felt like he had lockjaw from a staph infection. 

“Great!” Richie half-shouted. “Great,” he said again, quieter. Eddie tried to control his mouth. “What do you want on them?”

“I don’t know,” Eddie said. “Nothing?” Richie gasped, one hand over his chest, so Eddie had absolutely given the wrong answer. “I usually just dip them in coffee, but…”

“Alright, lame-o, I’ll make you some separate lame pancakes.”

“Thank you.”

“No prob, Spaghetti,” Richie said annoyingly, and put half a stick of butter in the pan. He looked happy. Eddie wanted to buy him an apron. He’d like that, Eddie thought, ‘kiss the cook’ or something of the sort.

Richie, Eddie should have realized thirty years earlier, was fucking insane. He left a pancake bubbling on the stove “on low. On low!”, got a packet of pre-shredded cheddar cheese from the fridge and a bottle of bacon bits—labeled “Baco Bites,” presumably to evade the FDA— and started putting handfuls of them into the middle of the pancakes. 

“Wait, wait one second,” he said, “just watch the pancake with the most cheese.” And then he left. Eddie had never actually cooked for himself, he realized. He had moved near-directly from his mother’s kitchen to his wife’s, which, aside from being pathetic, also seemed vaguely sexist. 

Anyway, he had absolutely no idea what to do if the pancake went south, or even how to know when that was happening. He watched the edges crisp up, light brown, and wondered if this was going to be the moment that he burned up all of Richie’s belongings and perhaps Richie too, for that matter. He imagined Richie melting like an Indiana Jones plastic corpse. 

Luckily, Richie swooped in, carrying a bag of Werther's Originals. He did not look at the pancakes like they were going to set the building on fire, just opened the Werther’s bag with a damp, mouth-like pop and sprinkled the leftover caramel dust onto the pancakes. Bits of dust hit the gas burner and sent up columns of flame.

“Sorry, dude,” Richie said, and backed Eddie up with one big hand on his chest. Eddie only had a few seconds to look vaguely insulted before Richie reached behind him and emerged with a sharp-edged rusty spatula.

Richie flipped over half of the cheddar-bacon-caramel pancakes like omelettes, kind of perfectly, and said, “Sorry for making my pancakes first, I just assumed—” a boiling oil droplet landed in his scraped-up stubble and he manically brushed it off, wincing. “I forgot you liked your pancakes lame, is all. But look,” he gestured at one of the pancake-omelettes, “look, I made this one for you, so you’re free to take as many bites as you want. And I’ll make you more regular ones, obviously.”

“I don’t want any bites.”

“Suit yourself,” Richie said, and flipped them out of the pan onto a plate. He grabbed one of them with bare fingers, took a bite, and pulled away wincing. “Hot! Burned muh mouf! Muh mouf!” Cheese ran from the swollen divet in the middle of his lower lip. “God dammit,” he said. “I just burned off my tastebuds for this delicious fried experience. Lemme make you some.”

Richie got up and poured batter into the now-hissing pan. “Wish I could do them in funny shapes,” he said. Eddie was starving and hooked on the sadistic reality show he was now in, so he reached over and grabbed a folded fucked-up piece of fried breakfast. He took a nibble.

And, holy fuck, it was good. Eddie groaned appreciatively and took an enormous bite, because who was Richie, Gordon Ramsay? Probably. 

“God, this is good,” Eddie said. “What the fuck, are you a good cook?” 

Richie grinned. “Dude, it’s pancakes.”

“Whatever, it’s good,” Eddie said, which must have been the right thing, because Richie lit up like a brittle Christmas tree on fire. 

Eddie watched the edges of the pancake darken. “Hey,” he said, feeling like he was asking Richie to underdog him on the shitty tire swing that ended up snapping with Bill in it and fracturing his ankle, “can I flip this one?”

Richie looked delighted. “Eds,” he said, “are  _ you _ a good cook?”

Eddie would’ve said, “yes,” but he could feel his ears starting to turn red.

If he’d looked happy before, now he looked ecstatic. “Are you a  _ bad cook _ ?”

“Shut up,” Eddie said, and snatched the spatula from Richie. Now their hands did brush, a little. “Is it ready?”

“You’re like a newborn baby,” Richie said. “I thought I was like a newborn baby, but I’m, like, a fucked-up Benjamin Button baby. You, on the other hand, have never made pancakes.”

“Okay, then fucking  _ instruct me _ ,” Eddie said, staring at the pancake with the tunnel vision he’d learned to apply whenever he was at work. “Tell me how right now.”

Richie’s breathing, not to mention his face, had gotten a little weird, and he laughed breathily. “Okay, yeah, it’s ready,” he said. “Just shimmy the spatula under the pancake.”

“Shimmy?”

“Yeah, like,” and Richie did a wiggly motion with his arm. “Just”—then he did one with his hand, this time very close to a lewd gesture. “Do that. With the spatula.”

“O _ kay _ ,” Eddie said,” and then he did manage, exhilaratingly, to get the spatula under the pancake. He grinned up at Richie, and Richie grinned back.

“Eds,” Richie said after a second, “you realize there’s another step, right?”

“Fuck off,” Eddie said, “I’m celebrating,” and then, emboldened by his first success, he tried to flip the pancake without any help.

It sailed into the air, somehow nailing Richie in the solar plexus.

“OW!” Richie careened backward. “Ouch! Shit!”

“Oh my god,” Eddie said, “Richie, I’m so—”

“No, don’t—” Richie said, and then  _ started wrestling his own shirt off _ , his back and shoulders moving in erratic jerks and then emerging pale and knobby-boned and broad. Richie’s body just had a lot of square footage, and a major portion of it was covered in soft-looking, flat-lying dark brown hair. He turned around, and it took a few long seconds for Eddie to muster the energy to scrape his gaze off Richie’s chest. 

“Sorry, dude,” Richie said. “Emergency medical striptease.”

“Did it burn you?” Eddie said, stepping toward Richie. “Shit, I’m really sorry.”

“Nah, it’s fine,” Richie said. “I think I got cheese in my chest hair, though.”

That this wasn’t even unappealing to Eddie should have been very alarming, but he couldn’t muster the energy to be properly scared, either. “Poor Richie,” Eddie said.

“Hey! The second you figure out you didn’t cause permanent damage, no sympathy!” He was ladling in another pancake. “I’m cutting you off on the pancake-flipping. Not that I don’t want hot batter on my naked chest—”

“Yeah,” Eddie said, “you really shouldn’t be cooking like that—”

“But I’m really fucking hungry, and you suck at this, so.” He leaned his elbow against a cabinet and grinned at Eddie.

The pavement had scraped across his cheekbone and chin, but the skin wasn’t bloody, just raw. The rest of his face was a little pink, too, probably from the shock of the pancake injury. Eddie looked at his square jaw and soft blue eyes and lopsided smile, then his stubbly neck and big shoulders, and then he finally looked away. “Where’s your silverware?” he asked. “Do you have napkins?”

“Do I have  _ napkins _ ? What kind of operation do you think I’m running here?” Richie asked, and then Eddie set the island with paper towels and mismatched forks and chipped mugs of water. Richie gave up on the cordyceps bit and got a Coke Zero from a cabinet entirely full of Coke Zero, which he drank lukewarm from the can. 

They did go out to buy coffee, not long after, Eddie jogging head-achingly and Richie taking long slow steps behind him. The sun was out, and everything smelled new and muddy and green after the storm. A few people stared idly at Richie, and might have even taken a photo were it not for Eddie’s poisonous glare. 

At Whole Foods, a couple of smooth-haired teenage girls scurried up to him. “Can I have a selfie?’ the leader said, and one of the others giggled. 

“Sure, you can.” Richie said, smiling evenly, stepping into the selfie frame. “Am I in the frame?” he said, self-deprecatingly awkward. He ran a hand over his face and did a ‘mystified old man’ face. They kept looking at Richie’s scraped cheek and at Eddie himself, and one of the girls kept quite obviously taking pictures of both. Richie saw it, too, and pointed to his raw red jawline. “Okay, this?” he said, “has a great story, actually. Last night I was running after Mr. Red,” and he pointed at Eddie,  _ Red? Mr. Red? _ “And it was raining like the mother of all fuckers,” he said that last part quietly, and the girls laughed. “This is Mr. Red, by the way, he’s one of my analysts and he saw me faceplant into the mud. I went down so hard that I, like, skidded across the pavement, on my face, so really this has been a fantastic week for me.” 

They seemed satisfied with his response, and flocked, chittering, around some stacked bread to go over their footage. It was amazing how easily Richie lied to them, how easily he  _ talked _ to them. Eddie wasn’t even the object of their gaze and he wanted to wring all their little necks. Mr. Red probably wouldn’t do that. 

“Sorry,” Richie said, “I just didn’t want people to think I had been hate-crimed or mugged or anything, and they might’ve thought you were my boyfriend if I said nothing, so—”

_ “Mr. Red?” _ Eddie said, stinging with hurt that Richie wouldn't want him as a boyfriend. He’d known it, of course: Richie probably went through men like he did Nicorette, and he was famous and had a lot to deal with and probably needed a better PR boyfriend than him. Also, Eddie was married, fully closeted, and irrationally scared of a group of female children, but—he didn’t know. 

“Yeah, I always thought Red was a nickname for Eddie, and I wasn’t sure if you wanted me to use your name, so.”

“Eddie is already a nickname,” he said, “everyone calls me Edward,” and he went to look for coffee. He wanted a free sample so his head would stop pounding. He did not want to think about Richie fake-naming him, because now he couldn’t tell the press that he was anything with Eddie without looking like a liar. Mr. Red. That came to Richie so easily, because obviously he wasn’t going to be anything with Eddie. Fucking obviously. 

One of the girls waved at him. On her own, Eddie could see that she was so young. Fuck, they all were. She flashed a nervous metal smile at him, and he was stupidly reminded of an adolescent Stan. Stan had always actually worn his retainer, unlike Richie.

Richie caught up with him, and kept softly, frantically explaining: “And I don’t know where the mister part came from, because I’m pretty sure LA teenagers don’t have to call adults ‘mister’ like we did, but I promise it was more along the lines of those  _ Reservoir Dogs _ dudes and totally unrelated to, like, ‘Mr. Grey will see you now.’ Sorry.” He rubbed the back of his neck, blinking through his horrible backup glasses. “I’ve been really choking with fans, these past days.” Almost as an afterthought, he winked and did a very unsubtle blowjob motion, in the middle of Whole Foods, at ‘choking.’ Eddie was struck with an incredible tenderness.

“No, I’m sorry,” he said. “I just don’t like the way they looked at you.”

_ “I hate when other men look at you,” _ he half-mimicked, without malice. “Mr. Grey will see you now.” He hawked a loud guffaw into his armpit. The girls probably heard. Eddie elbowed him in the side, and they left the store, matching stride. Richie grinned at him, brighter than anything, and Eddie remembered that he had to go home.

“So, okay,” Richie said, back at the apartment, talking fast, “this is the part of the day when I watch eight hours of TV. I don’t know what you want to do, but that’s where I’m at. We could also go to, uh, Disneyland, or the Getty. Or the combined Disneyland-Getty that’s actually a haunted house built around Walt Disney’s frozen head. I’m making that up.”

“Really?” Eddie said. “You’re telling me Walt Disney’s frozen head isn’t on display as modern art?”

“Yup,” Richie said. “I’m not making up Disneyland, though. That shit is completely real.”

Eddie was still pretty successfully running on joy-fumes, but they were coming up against a wall of pure exhaustion. He had no interest in going to the Getty. Going to Disneyland with Richie actually sounded incredibly fun, but he thought he’d probably keel over if they tried. “What TV do you watch?” he asked.

“Uh, literally all,” Richie said. “What TV do  _ you _ watch?”

Eddie hadn’t watched much TV since he and Myra had canceled their HBO subscription and stopped watching  _ Girls _ together. It had been for the best, since he’d always dealt pretty terribly with the Adam Driver sex scenes. That is, he looked them all up on YouTube afterwards and jerked off to them. Now he watched  _ Naked and Afraid _ religiously, but he was certain any joke Richie could possibly make about that would trigger Eddie into some kind of respiratory event in his current state. “None,” he said, “so you have to pick.”

With a groan, Richie collapsed onto the living room couch (which was also, of course, a futon). “Uh, hold on,” he said, and held the remote very close to his face as he clicked around. His ridiculously huge TV screen lit up. “Have you seen SpongeBob?”

Eddie blinked. “Is that a cartoon?

“Yeah,” Richie said, “and it’s fucking  _ great _ ,” and an hour later Eddie was laughing so hard over children’s television his eyes were watering. Richie kept glancing at Eddie out of the corner of his eye and smiling really big. Eddie felt his heart contract. 

He shifted on the couch, trying to figure out whether there was a way to get closer to Richie without it arousing suspicion or anything else. He felt something vaguely key-shaped wedged behind the couch cushion and reached behind himself to fish it out.

It was a pair of black leather handcuffs. 

Richie’s face had gone completely white. “Oh Jesus,” he said. On the screen, Squidward played the clarinet.

Eddie stared at the handcuffs, then at Richie, then back at the handcuffs. He blinked back an onslaught of vivid, fully-formed pornographic mental images, to little avail, but at least it gave him the illusion of a tiny sliver of control. 

“Okay,” Richie said. “So, I realize that probably finding your friend’s sex handcuffs is a traumatic event. So if you want me to leave the room, or the apartment—or actually the country—”

“No,” Eddie said, and he dropped the handcuffs like they’d burned him. “No, it’s—”

“Seriously, like—I mean, in the couch cushion—” Now Richie was turning redder and redder, which was something beautiful and strange. It was hard to make Richie Tozier blush. But now, for him, he was doing it, and Eddie wanted—well, he wanted some really explicit, absolutely not-okay things for someone with a prenup. The handcuffs looked pretty small. Would they even fit, if—? Richie had huge hands, big bony wrists with thick veins and raised tendons.

Fuck. Shit. “Do you have, um, a boyfriend?” Eddie asked insanely.

“I—what?” Richie said. “What about this apartment makes you think I have a boyfriend?”

“These just seem like a, uh,” Eddie said, “a joint investment.”

“I—it’s, um.” Richie put a hand over his face, under his glasses, like he was trying to dig out his eyeballs. “Okay, you know what? Fuck it. I’m going to make fun of you, even though you can make fun of me so much more: have you never heard of casual sex?”

“I’ve heard of it,” Eddie said, in incredible pain. 

“Oh, what, now you’re gonna slut-shame me?” Richie did a little absurd giggle, which meant that he, at least, was feeling better. Eddie was not. “Like, kinky,” another giggle, hand back under his glasses, and Eddie was in a state of abject misery, “but  _ now?  _ Not, you know, five minutes ago. Now is when I have to explain hookup culture to you, to contextualize my own skankiness.”

“Wait,” Eddie said, alarmed, “you let strange men handcuff you to your furniture?” 

“Yep!” Richie did a weird toothy half smile, eyes moving from Eddie’s face to—to, well, what Eddie was probably fantasizing was his chest, because of how decently proud of it he was, and thinking about his own workout habits was at least a way to derail his mind from the tracks it was headed down.

“You’re going to get robbed,” Eddie said. “You’re just absolutely going to get robbed. I’m shocked you haven’t already gotten robbed.”

“What, when I’m, like—” and Richie snatched up the handcuffs and mimed locking himself to the coffee table, and breathily whined, “no, nooo, please don’t steal my stuff. I will be very disappointed if you steal my mint-condition Cuisinart immersion blender, okay? This is an honor system.” Which made Eddie laugh, even though he didn’t want to, somehow snorting through his throat. Until Richie started squirming around on the floor, pulling at the very thin clothing he had on in ways that basically rendered it useless, the clothing, that is, and looking up at Eddie through his eyelashes for the goddamn bit. _ For the bit! _ Eddie shouted at himself, internally, which did not help. 

Eddie stood up very quickly, putting some more space between Richie and Eddie’s body generally and crotch specifically. “I’m going to take a nap!” he announced, too loud, and fled. He changed into his pajamas, then went back into the living room to get his phone, and Richie was still on the couch.

Richie’s eyebrows flew to his hairline. “Are those—”

“Think carefully about whatever you’re about to say,” Eddie said, having calmed down a little. “Now I know you have restraints in the house and I can rob you really fucking easily, if I don’t like it.”

Richie’s eyes widened, and then he burst into loud, hysteria-tinged laughter. “Holy  _ shit _ , okay,” he said, red again. “Sicks PJs, dude.”

“Thanks,” Eddie said, and walked around him to get his phone from the coffee table. He didn’t trust himself to physically reach across Richie right now.

“Hey, do you want any weed?” Richie chuckled and rubbed the back of his neck. “A real, uh,  _ joint _ investment. Ha. Actually I have a vape,” he went on, when Eddie didn’t respond. “So no, like, carcinogens. Yeah, I know about those.”

Eddie actually considered it. He was in his pajamas—if they started smelling ineradicably like weed, no one would ever know. “No, thanks,” he said finally, remembering the time in high school he’d smoked too much weed on Bill’s roof and became convinced that It was about to climb up the chimney like Santa Claus. Also, if he lost even an ounce of self-possession right now, he would launch himself at Richie like a rabid bat, which just wasn’t an option. Richie was staring at him with—solicitousness verging on deference, basically, which compounded the handcuffs situation pretty badly.

“Okay, well,” Richie said, “I’m not gonna list everything, but, like, I’ve got a full menu. I have bars, if you want any.” Eddie scoffed, because he almost certainly had way more bars on him than Richie did. Richie’s eyes widened. “Wait, are you a  _ pillhead _ ?”

“Fuck you,” Eddie said, “I am not.”

“You’re like a ’50s housewife on barbiturates,” Richie said, delighted. “Holy shit.”

“ _ Fuck _ you,” Eddie said again. Richie was making a face like he correctly suspected Eddie had been knocking himself out nightly to avoid sex for the past ten or so years. “I’m really  _ not _ . I have a job.”

“You think it’s ’50s housewives’ fault they don’t have jobs?” Richie asked. “Pretty fucked up, Eds.”

“I’m going to sleep, asshole,” Eddie said, and stood up. He hesitated. “Wake me up when you want to have dinner, if I’m not awake already. Okay? I don’t want you to wait.”

Richie gave really stupid thumbs ups and a toothy grin. Eddie had to flee the room again before he did something drastic.

**Richie**

“Richie,” Steve said, “I’m sorry, but a fifteen-minute set at the Comedy Store does not a career revival make.” He was at a coffee shop, drinking a cappuccino from an enormous mug. Steve seemed to always be at a coffee shop, maybe because Richie was always talking to him on the weekends, when normal, happy people went out in public. “If you can’t write your own jokes again, you need new writers. Okay? I’m not being an asshole here, I’m being realistic. Thanks,” he said to a waiter. Richie hadn’t even known there was such a thing as a sit-down coffee shop until Steve started calling him from them.

“What gay dude is gonna be willing to write for me?” Richie asked. “I’m, like—I mean, gay marriage would’ve been legal sooner if it weren’t for me. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell would’ve ended like ten years earlier if I’d never been born.”

“Uh huh,” Steve said, looking distracted. “Sorry, I just saw Conan. Give me a second.” He put Richie on hold. Richie took the opportunity to delete an email from Steve with the subject, !IMPORTANT OPPORTUNITY!, whose contents Steve had just explained to him and which Richie had unequivocally vetoed. “Okay, I’m back,” Steve said. “I’m sure we can find a gay man willing to write for you,” and he gave Richie the look that meant  _ I am a gay man willing to work with you, if you haven’t noticed _ , which Richie, as usual, ignored.

“I don’t,” Richie said, and sighed. “I—look, I know it’s fucking stupid, but I just. Like. The idea of reading something someone else wrote onstage right now makes me want to kill myself in a very literal way.”

Steve drank his coffee without breaking screen-mediated eye contact. “I understand,” he said—ha!—“but. Richie. Look, your set was fine. I mean it, it was good. But. You haven’t been able to produce consistently since—”

“Since forever, okay, I fucking know that,” Richie said. “I know I’m a complete fuckup and I can’t even do my stupid easy job.”

Steve looked heavenward. “I’m just saying,” he said, “that you need to—” He broke off, eyes widening.

Richie glanced at his own face in the corner of the screen. He looked incredibly stupid in his huge headphones, but what else was new. Then he saw—“Hey, Eds,” he said, turning around. “Gotta go, bye,” he told Steve.

“Do you have a  _ boy— _ ” Steve got out before Richie hung up on him.

“Sorry if I—” Eddie cut himself off with a yawn. “Sorry if I interrupted you.”

“You didn’t,” Richie said, prying off the headphones.

“In that case, why the fuck didn’t you wake me up?” Eddie padded over to the sink and filled a glass with water.

“You were up really late dealing with my bullshit,” Richie said. “It’s the least I could do.”

“Asshole,” Eddie said. “It’s 8 pm”

“It’s literally 7,” Richie said.

“It’s 7:12.”

“That’s way closer to 7,” Richie said. “I thought you did math for your job, dude.”

“I thought you did jokes for yours,” Eddie said airily, and Richie doubled over in hysterics. Eddie looked smug and walked to the living room, where he landed on one of the chairs with a soft sigh. Richie had a moment of totally abject disappointment over the fact that he hadn’t sat next to Richie on the couch.

“Okay, Ebenezer Scrooge,” Richie said. “You want to get dinner? There’s a lot of restaurants on this block.”

“You know, you’re basically wearing pajamas,” Eddie said. “A t-shirt is pretty much pajamas. The only difference is that I actually dress like I’m in public when I’m in public.”

“Yeah, and you dress like you’re in the Victorian era when you aren’t,” Richie said. “Either that or, like, the ’50s. Like the dad on  _ Leave it to Beaver _ .”

“I thought I was a house _ wife _ ,” Eddie said. “Now I’m a dad?”

“Housewives can be daddies too,” Richie said, and then he had to very quickly whip his phone out and redownload Yelp (it seemed like Yelp reviews would matter to Eddie) in order to deflect. He had already established himself as the giant hairy gross orangutan he was—several times this weekend—with his weird too-long arms and his mind going  _ think carefully about whatever you’re about to say,  _ in Eddie’s voice, over and over, to which he had very silently jerked off twice, because he was suddenly fourteen years old again and had no idea what was good for him. He didn’t need any more ammunition, god help him.

They ended up at a couple-filled Italian place, but Eddie wasn’t weird about it, so Richie tried not to be either. He was weird, of course, but he thought it was basically along the lines of normal weird. Eddie didn’t seem too shocked and appalled by it—by any of it, actually, not the garbage or the (oh god) handcuffs or the candle at the table or whatever he was doing with his face now. 

“I think I’m gonna start writing my own shit,” Richie said quickly. “Which I haven’t done since my twenties, so I don’t think it’s gonna be very good, but. Well. I already kind of tanked my career, and remembering how insane I was as a kid really gave me a lot of material.”

Eddie looked at him, very serious, and shifted his tongue inside his mouth. He was running it over the scar in his cheek, Richie realized, and felt electrocuted. “I’m really proud of you, Rich,” he said, finally. “I mean it.” 

“Yeah, well.” Richie said. “You killed a clown monster with a piece of fence, and I’m barely holding it together in my attempt to do the exact shit everyone thought I was already doing, so. Same here, I guess.”

“We all killed the clown, dude, don’t pull that on me.”

“Yeah,” Richie said, “but you were the only one who looked like some kind of Viking warrior doing it.” Eddie blinked at him with inexplicable, unbearable softness. “I was probably making a bunch of weird faces.”

“None of us looked cool doing it,” he said. “Except maybe Bev.” He grinned. “Oh my god, is Bev our only cool friend?”

“Bev is on a houseboat right now,” Richie said. “She has  _ been _ our only cool friend. But, oh my god, you think I have weird sex things? Just look at her face.”

“Bev isn’t here right now,” Eddie said. “I can’t look at her face.”

Richie whipped his head around, like Bev had just been sitting with them and suddenly disappeared, and Eddie tensed. He grabbed a fork, of all things, and checked behind Richie for the clown. Because Richie had already made him jumpy with all his talk about Viking warriors, most likely, and now he just really hammered in the whole “making Eddie uncomfortable” thing by making a joke so bad that eddie thought he was being attacked by a sadistic sewer-monster. Wow, Tozier. 

But Eddie just held up the fork and laughed. “What’d I think I was gonna do with this?” He waved it around. “Twirl It’s noodles?”

Richie felt like Eddie was twirling the noodles that made up his brain. He did not say _you’re so brave, Spaghetti, so fucking brave that you make me less scared of myself_ , and instead said “I wish I could talk about the clown, in my set, even just to say ‘Mr. Spaghetti is going to _twirl_ your _noodles_ if any of you haggle me.’” 

Eddie made a threatening noodle-twirling motion at Richie. “You used to use that like this fucking catch-all adjective for things about me,” he said. “Like—”  _ Spaghetti condoms _ , oh Jesus, what the fuck had been wrong with him. “Spaghetti condoms,” Eddie said, and turned red. “Do not put that in your set if you’re going to say something mean, okay, do not.”

“All I do is say mean things.” Richie said, effectively projecting calm. “That’s literally my job, saying mean things.” 

“Well, maybe you should say nice things next time,” Eddie said, which was so ridiculous that Richie had to laugh into his water. The waiter asked them what they wanted, and Richie wanted to ask him for feedback as to whether he would enjoy a comedy set that was just him saying nice things. A nice thing ASMR, but live, narrated by Richie. Most of them would probably be about Eddie.

“You have no idea the mean things I said to my father. Especially when he was trying to teach me to drive,” Richie said. “I was such a dick. I’ve been a dick my whole life, but I have never been such a dick as I was to Wentworth Tozier, with regularity, while driving his vehicle.” 

“I can imagine.” Eddie said. 

“You really can’t.”

“Bet you a quarter,” Eddie said, which was what they always said as kids, trying to prove how invested they were in making a particular point. “Goddamn, a quarter?” Eddie said again, and laughed. “We’re both so old, and so rich.” He inhaled through his teeth, and Richie thought he was going to say something particularly devastating, but instead, he said, “The way I made some of my money was really, really morally—” He hissed through his teeth and nose, simultaneously. “Ethically dubious.”

“Holy shit, were you doing something with drugs?” Eddie looked at him, kind of stunned. “Did you break bad?”

“No, oh my god, I was working for J.P. Morgan in 2008,” he said.

He looked so sad, like a kewpie doll that had dropped its ice cream, at this lame fact, that Richie did not even bring up the wife situation. Or the fact that Richie was a considerably worse person, because he had literally left a corpse in his wake in Derry. Instead, he said, “I mean, obviously, same. Have you seen my bits from the 2000s? Have you seen them from _ now? _ ” He got his phone out. “I’m going to show you something that’ll just—”

“That isn’t necessary,” Eddie said, and almost knocked his wine over reaching across the table for Richie’s phone. To piss Eddie off, Richie held it over his head. “ _ Fuck  _ you,” Eddie exclaimed as the waiter appeared. They didn’t get dessert.

As soon as they got back to the apartment, Eddie sat down on the couch, grabbed the remote, and asked, loudly, “What channel’s CNN on this thing?”

“Oh, fuck you,” Richie said. “I’m not falling for that.”

“Seriously, I want to watch CNN,” he said. “The election’s next week. Tell me how to find CNN!” He made crazy eyes at Richie. “ _ Where is CNN _ ,” he said like John Wick.

“You sound like John Wick,” Richie said, and elbowed Eddie in the side until he dropped the remote. He started flipping through channels at random. “We got, uh,” he said, “we got  _ Top Chef _ , that could be you—” Eddie seemed to register this as a cooking joke and not a combined cooking-sex joke, which was a big relief—“we got  _ SVU _ , we got— _ Survivor? _ ”

“That isn’t  _ Survivor _ ,” Eddie said. “Wait, wait, stop flipping channels, Richie. Go back.”

Very deliberately, staring at Eddie with his eyebrows raised, Richie went back.

“It’s  _ Naked and Afraid _ . Let’s watch that,” Eddie said. Richie kept staring at him. “Don’t start,” he said.

This was all the cue Richie needed to start. “Is that still your number one fantasy? Don’t make that face, I’m not talking about, like, as a sex thing,” though of course he was talking about it like that, but he was trying not to make Eddie hate him, “but, all of your Eagle Scout shit.”

“I wasn’t an Eagle Scout,” Eddie said. “That was Bill. My mother wouldn’t let me.”

“You were more of an Eagle Scout than any Eagle Scout, dude,” Richie said. “You were, like, a freelancer. An Eagle entrepreneur.”

Eddie opened his mouth to respond, but then the couple on the TV started eating snakes whole, and his eyes were suddenly glued to the screen.

“That’s actually hot,” Richie said, in spite of his best efforts, and Eddie punched him in the shoulder.

“Augh,” Eddie said. “Jesus. Look at those mosquitoes. That’s disgusting.”

“ _ That _ ’s what’s disgusting?”

“The snake thing was actually a great idea,” Eddie said. “What else are they gonna eat? But the mosquitoes they should really do something about.”

“You got any ideas?”

“You get one survival item, and no one  _ ever _ brings a net,” Eddie said, launching into a detailed explanation of what exactly he thought they should be doing about the mosquitoes. Richie got them both beers, and at the end of the episode Eddie changed into his old man pajamas and Richie changed into his least horrible pair of sweatpants, which were, at least, from Uniqlo, even if they had a green Tabasco stain on the thigh.

They were a few minutes into the next episode when Eddie turned to Richie. “Okay, shit,” he said. “I woke up three hours ago, I’m never going to be able to fall asleep,” and he made a meaningful microexpression.

Slowly, Richie started to grin.

Eddie sighed loudly. “I’m going to regret this.”

“No,” Richie said, bouncing off the couch. “No, you will  _ not  _ regret this. Edward. Eds. Eddie Spaghetti. You are not going to regret this  _ at all _ .”

“The more you say that, the more sure I am that I will,” Eddie said.

“No! Seriously! You won’t!” Richie was rifling through the coffee table’s designated weed drawer. “I’m just  _ excited _ , Eds. This is huge for me. This is like when I got you to take a hit in the eleventh grade.”

“The time I  _ coughed up blood _ ?”

“You spat out blood because you bit your tongue!” Richie said. “Then you kept trying to call your pediatrician on the Denbroughs’ landline, holy  _ shit  _ you were high.”

“I was not that—” Eddie started, then seemed to realize that if he hadn’t been that high the only explanation for the pediatrician call would be innate instinct, and that was even dorkier. “If that happens to me again, I will fucking kill you.”

“Spitting out blood?” Richie asked. “Calling your pediatrician on Bill’s phone?”

“ _ Getting that high _ ,” Eddie said. “I’m serious, if I see fucking  _ anything  _ weird, you’re gonna have to answer for it.”

“You want me to talk to the weird thing you see?” Richie asked. “Or pretend I  _ am  _ the weird thing? Or what?”

“Please, neither,” Eddie said. He snatched the vape out of Richie’s hand. “What do I do?”

“Dude, I’ll show you,” Richie said. He took a very dramatic hit and passed it back to Eddie. Eddie didn’t wipe it off before putting it in his mouth, basically accepting Richie’s germs with open arms, which he would never have done when they were kids, even when they were hooking up. Richie felt a jolt of shock deep in his chest.

Eddie inhaled, paused, exhaled, and, after a second, started coughing like crazy. “ _ Fuck _ ,” he choked out, and then suddenly started swatting at Richie. “Don’t say a fucking—“ he broke off— “a fucking  _ word _ .”

“You want some water, man?” Richie asked. “Or, like, 2% milk? Ovaltine? Infant formula?” Eddie kicked him in the shin. “ _ Ow _ ,” he said, and Eddie flipped him off.

When he got the coughing under control (Richie got him a glass of water, obviously), Eddie turned the volume back up on  _ Naked and Afraid _ . “You doing okay, bud?” Richie asked.

“Seriously, I will fuck you up,” Eddie said, still a little gravelly.

“I forgot weed makes you crazier,” Richie said. “You’re the only person this is true for.”

“That’s just, like,” Eddie said. “That’s. There’s no way that’s.” He seemed very torn between looking at Richie and watching the Samsung Galaxy commercial on the TV. “You could not be more wrong if you tried,” he finally managed.

Richie laughed and crossed his arms so he wouldn’t reach for Eddie. They watched hot young people survive in the wild for something like half an hour. Richie was getting pretty into it, to the point where he was only glancing obsessively over at the hollow of Eddie’s throat once every couple minutes, when Eddie hit mute and said, “Richie, I gotta tell you something.”

Richie’s heart stopped. “Huh?” he said.

Eddie was leaning his head against the back of the couch, staring at the ceiling. He swallowed, his whole perfect neck convulsing. “You shouldn’t be proud of me,” he said finally.

“What?” Richie blinked, confused.

“I’m—listen. I’m not a good person. You can’t—with the Viking shit. It’s not, whatever. Most of the time it’s not true at all. Okay?” He folded his arms across his chest, his shoulders neatly angular under the crisp fabric, and the fact of his beauty didn’t distract Richie, it just compounded everything else, or magnified it. He was so beautiful. “I only do what I think might make me safe, and I fuck everyone else over and I don’t get any safer, and now I’m fucking whining about it to you. So.”

“Eds, you are a  _ badass _ ,” Richie said. “You’re so fucking brave, you have no idea. You, like—murder clown aside, you made me so much braver as a kid, and—” Eddie tried to interrupt him, but Richie wasn’t having it. Richie was going to say one real, honest thing in his life, even if he died of mortification after. “You were the reason I came out. I thought, if Eddie can give me this incredible thrill of by-proxy courage in Derry, then and now, I can do this.” 

Richie was struck with terror that Eddie would think that he came out with the intention of, he didn’t know, getting married or something, but Eddie looked at him with these giant, red eyes, and said, “You’re brave, too. You saved our lives.”

Hearing that again, hearing it from  _ Eddie _ again _ ,  _ made Richie feel sharp and mean and scared, so he spat, “With murder, dude. I’m a weapon, or I’m a funny fucking Thanksgiving centerpiece that people can comment on when they run out of shit to say, but I’m not—it’s not—I just want to go back to being a centerpiece.”

“Please stop saying ‘murder,’” Eddie said. “It wasn’t even manslaughter, you were acquitted.”

“Are you a fucking cop?”

“Fuck you,” Eddie said. “Look, you don’t have to—whatever. You already know I think you did the right thing, if you don’t want to believe me that’s your choice. But—you don't get to act like coming out wasn’t brave. If you do that, I can say I only did anything to It because of what you said to me, so what I did didn’t mean anything. None of it cancels out, dude.” He swallowed. “What you did’s a lot harder than what I did, anyway.”

Richie gaped at him, genuinely, not even for dramatic effect. “Telling people I like dick is easier than throwing a spear into the heart of a demon alien?”

“Changing your life,” Eddie snapped.

“Dude, I didn’t have that much life to change. It was like—one step. I’m the only person in it. My life, I mean,” Richie said. “No one thinks it would be a good idea to rely on me, so no moving parts. Not that they’re wrong.”

Eddie just looked at him for awhile, blinking slowly. “I’m a fucking moving part,” he said finally, but he didn’t sound mad. Ordinarily, he would, or maybe that was just when they were kids—Eddie always used to hate when Richie implied, no matter how vaguely, that Eddie wasn’t important to him.  _ How the tables have turned, _ Richie thought, but really the tables had always been turned on him. Eddie went to college in Boston, and Richie’s mom had gotten really worried that Richie would respond by becoming a prostitute in LA. Instead, he became a professional clown. 

“Yeah. It’s different now, with all the Losers back. I just—it’s taking me some time, is all.”

“Me too,'' Eddie said, and did not specify what was taking him time. Then they went to bed, in their cold separate bedrooms, and Richie lay awake for a long time staring at his phone’s lock screen and thinking: you are so fucked. Your soul is fucked, and your face isn't much better. 

**Eddie**

Eddie woke up when it was still dark out, to quietly pack and Uber to the airport, but Richie stumbled into the kitchen in the pink dawn light, yawned, and said “I can drive you. Want breakfast?” Which pretty much settled that. 

“Sorry, did I wake you up?” Eddie said. 

“No, I woke myself up. I can drive you,” he said again. “If you want.”

“Of course.”

“Great, great.” Richie yawned again into his armpit. “Breakfast? I’m not making an effort, it’s too early, but I have Pop-Tarts, and my toaster probably works if you want them warm.” He shoved his hand into the back of a cabinet and emerged with two rectangles of crinkly astronaut-food. 

“Sure,” Eddie said absently. Richies toaster looked like a miniature oven, and he kept trying to turn it on without plugging it in and staring down at it with frustrated grunts. Eddie plugged it in for him, and it lit up, bathing Richie’s face in dangerous orange light. Richie tore open the foil with his teeth and gave a little shudder. 

“Ugh, my teeth just rubbed together,” he said. “Nails on a chalkboard.” He threw them into the oven—literally threw them, with a kind of obnoxious amount of spin—flicked the door closed, and wandered out of the room with a can of Coke Zero, which he took with him into the bathroom. Certainly this grossed Eddie out a little, but it was a fond and soft-around-the-edges kind of grossed out. This was when Eddie got up for work; he imagined Richie cross-contaminating his soda in the predawn while Eddie got dressed and ate his usual smoothie, and he didn’t feel too sharp or painful a pang, since he’d been losing his mind over Richie for about twenty-four consecutive hours now, but he did sigh.

“Okay,” Richie said, crossing the kitchen, and then he exclaimed in a kind of SpongeBob-inflected voice, punctuated at the end by a huge yawn, “coming right up! Ouch, ouch, ouch, hot!” He threw the Poptart onto a chipped plastic plate and blew on his fingers. “Shit, I’m getting every kind of breakfast injury this weekend.”

“You’ve gotten pretty much every kind of injury, period,” Eddie said. Then, because he was an idiot, and because he had some deranged idea that the best way to express solidarity with Richie’s condition would be to feel what he felt, Eddie didn’t wait for the Pop-Tart to cool down before he picked it up and took an enormous bite.

It burned his tongue, but that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that he held it in his mouth for what felt like a decade, he had to, breathing around it until it cooled down, so when he bit into it and tried to swallow, the horrible false jammy thing had already soaked up all of his saliva. He hadn’t eaten a Pop-Tart in fifteen years, he realized, and he used to like them. But now it was so sweet and so dry and stuck to his uvula. The horrible fake jelly inside made the tender little teeth in the back of his jaw ache, and he felt himself almost retch and had to run to the trashcan and spit it out. 

He looked over his shoulder at Richie, waiting for a soft click of tongue and the horrible furrowed silence of someone realizing,  _ this poor, poor little thing is psychologically wrecked _ . 

Instead, Richie tried to scramble onto the remaining stool and did a Gollum impression. “It chokes us! It chokes us!” Richie rasped. “We cannot eat Hobbitses food anymore! It chokes us!” Which sounded just about right.

Eddie sometimes felt a lot like Gollum, climbing around in the caves of his mind with only his psychological wreckage for company. He remembered his old selves, and sometimes had discussions with the more human Eddie, who was named Spaghetti instead of Sméagol, and went fishing in cool clean water and was not so afraid to touch his naked knee to Richie's. But that hardly mattered. He had forgotten the taste of bread, and now he was a small thing made of ropes and garbled sounds, and he couldn’t ever be seen for who he was then, nor for who he was now. He was in some new goddamn pupal stage. He had been in pupal stages all his life. 

That was the thing about Richie, Eddie thought, wiping spit and pink crumbs from the corners of his mouth and slamming the metal top of the garbage closed so he wouldn’t have to look at mushy Pop-Tart remains: Richie was shockingly tolerant of the weird, the crazy, the pupal. He thought it was funny, of course, and he made jokes, but he never looked at Eddie with patronizingly furrowed brows and nothing to say. Anyone else would, over something or another.

“I have very soft molars,” Eddie tried to explain. “It’s—that amount of sugar really fucking hurts soft molars.” 

“Can I feel ‘em?” Richie made grabby hands. “What kind of texture- oft, are we talking here? :ike gumdrops? Like butter? How soft?”

Eddie pulled a face “Butter? Dude, ugh.”

“Like slug-soft?” Richie was wiggling his fingers around a little, still, though the movement was more subdued than it would probably be if it were a time other than 6 am. “I’m pretty much an expert, you know. I dated a dentist. Out of curiosity.”

“Your dad was a dentist!”

“Yeah, like  _ that _ ’s the most perverted thing about dating a dentist.”

Eddie folded his arms. “What’s so wrong with dentists?”

“Extraction and filling,” Richie said, and made a buzzy drilling sound effect. “How does that not register as kinky to you?

“Your dad was  _ my _ dentist,” Eddie said, and his face got so hot he started sweating a little.

“This really explains it,” Richie said. “That whole time, that  _ whole time _ , you were just trying to get closer to  _ Wentworth _ ! You were just—”

“Fuck you,” Eddie said. “Seriously, if you don’t shut the fuck up—”

“What, you’re gonna make me? You confusing me with my dad?” Richie said, and made another drilling sound effect, then pretended, with terrifying accuracy, to talk around a latex-gloved hand. “Hey, Mr. To—”

“That is so disgusting,” Eddie said. “You’re throwing your own father under the bus for this bit, and it’s disgusting.” Disgusting, unfortunately, was not the only thing Richie’s fingers-in-his-mouth voice was, and Eddie started drinking his coffee very quickly so he didn’t have to worry about what his face was doing. 

“Yeah, and I’d be, like, rifling through this guys drawers, the dentist, like  _ where’s the scalpel? _ And he was shockingly, disappointingly normal. Either that, or a serial killer. But anyway, I was like,” and Richie did a slightly exaggerated version of his own voice, moving his mouth and eyebrows in self-imitation, “so what kind of weird shit do dentists get up to in bed? And, like you said, my dad was a dentist—” Eddie folded over in snorting hysterics. 

“Why would a dentist have a scalpel?” he said, when he could breathe. “Did you actually date a dentist, by the way, or is this an elaborate daddy-joke setup? Or a drilling joke setup?”

“My life is an elaborate drilling joke setup, Eds. So you will never know.” Eddie moved closer to Richie’s face, scanning his expression like Sherlock Holmes. Richie tried to look like a wax statue, but he kept cracking up. 

“You actually  _ did?” _

“What’s so wrong with dentists, Eds?” 

Now Eddie was curious, and more than a little jealous. “What happened?”

“Oh, he dumped me.” Richie grinned. “Something about a closeted comedian not being a great partner to have in pursuit of sincere, low-profile upper-middle-class homosexuality was a shock. It was like the equivalent of trying to make yourself fall in love with a gag gift, out of obligation, after you fuck it. Not gonna work, and it doesn’t make sense.” God, Eddie thought, slightly nauseous. He felt a horrible kinship with the anonymous dentist. The Pop-Tart jelly coating the area beneath his tongue seemed to crack with the sudden dryness of his mouth. 

Richie must have seen him swallowing dryly, because he softened, searching Eddie’s face. “You good, Eds?” He got up, filled a mug with water, and offered it to Eddie. Eddie snatched it and gulped it down, shakily, before looking up at Richie. He was standing awkwardly, fingers in his hair. “Do you need, like, mouthwash? I have mouthwash.”

“No, Richie. Pop-Tarts dissolve.” Eddie knew he sounded significantly bitchier than normal. 

Richie backed away, just a couple steps. “Yeah, sorry for, like, over-sharing in such a fucking manic way, this—this whole time, actually.” He did an open-faced, apologetic little shoulder-twitch. “I know you came to deal with my, like, gay feelings and got flooded. The dam broke, but I can fix it. We’ll talk tomorrow and I’ll have had the whole breach reconstructed.”

Eddie had forgotten about it, but Richie got like this when they were kids, too: if he stacked collateral and Eddie shut him down anyway, out of some tangentially-related spot of bitterness, Richie would plummet into a manically unhappy vulnerability spiral. He was already starting to make increasingly crude and obviously false jokes, nearly a yard away now, and kept dipping his head around searching for eye contact.

In high school, the further Richie went like this, the more convinced Eddie would become that the initial collateral had been a joke too—not a true joke, but a joke based on a lie, a joke whose sole purpose was to fuck with Eddie after all. Eddie hadn’t known which question to be more terrified by: what Richie’s decision to fuck with Eddie meant about what he didn’t know about Eddie, or what Richie’s decision to fuck with Eddie meant about what he  _ felt _ for Eddie, whether he cared about Eddie at all or just liked getting yelled at, the same way it sometimes really seemed that he liked getting sparked at, kicked at, punched.

Richie’d let Eddie sort through his kitchen cabinet and call him brave. He wasn’t in a place to fuck with anyone right now. “You gotta put the dentist thing in a set. It’s smart as hell,” he said, because he didn’t know what else to say.

Richie grinned down at him. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, dumbass.”

“I’m a smart dumbass,” he said, and then laughed, a little wildly. “How’s that for fucking comedy? It’s an oxymoron!” He said ‘oxymoron’ with a little hand wiggle. “Damn, look at me. For someone so depressed, I really am that easy to please.” 

“Easy, too,” Eddie said, before he had a chance to bite it back, because that was pretty much what he had to offer for collateral himself, when it came down to it. A willingness to get involved, to look at Richie and not look away.

“That’s it,” Richie said. “I should never have told you about hookup culture. I should’ve said that I fight crime at night, and I don’t want the criminals to get carpal tunnel.”

“Metal handcuffs are definitely not how you get carpal tunnel,” Eddie could feel himself grinning. “You’re going to learn how to get carpal tunnel when I start pressuring you to write. I can edit,” he added. “I’m not all that good at creative writing, though.”

“Counterpoint: you have been telling me what to shut up about since the fourth grade.”

“Yeah. Shut up about how I don’t like your gay feelings. I love your gay feelings, okay, and I know exactly how many you have. I can take it. I’m not a fragile flower.”

Ritchie laughed. “Oh yeah? Oh really, because—”

“Shut up.”

“Are you sure, I mean—”

“Shut up,” Eddie said again. They were in a rhythm now.

“Shut up, is that all you can say?”

“No.” Eddie said, and Richie laughed. 

“No. Yesh. Shuddup.” Ritchie said in a coarse Norwegian voice. “Ravage me, oh barbarian warrior.”

“I feel like that is kind of xenophobic.”

“Yeah, if you’re in Ancient Rome.”

“You are Nero, for sure. Making jokes while the world burns.”

“I’m the one burning the world,” Richie said, but instead of bringing up Bowers, he continued, “Like, what I produce contributes to the downfall of society. Not just the comedy, either. You haven’t even seen me on the guitar, yet. I never let you listen, when we were kids.”

“Yeah, I did, but when you were playing classical Spanish guitar.” Richie had received a guitar for his thirteenth birthday under the condition that he would take classical music lessons with an elderly woman named Mercedes, who sometimes accompanied the school choir. This lasted for about nine months before Richie figured out that, if he played the riff from “Smoke on the Water” over and over for the duration of every lesson, she would eventually stop letting him into her home, and he would be free to spend that weekly half-hour wreaking general havoc instead. Still, Eddie had been to his first recital. In retrospect, Eddie was pretty sure Richie’s terrible rendition of “El Condor Pasa” had, if not catalyzed, then permanently cemented Eddie’s crush on him. 

“Okay, well, I am still really bad at it. Like, impressively awful.”

“Come on, show me.” Eddie grinned.

“Some horrible jangly sounds, coming right up. Get it while it's hot!” Richie shouted, loud enough for the neighbors to hear. Eddie had forgotten just how  _ loud _ Richie was.  _ Poor neighbors, _ he thought, without a drop of real sympathy. 

Richie disappeared with a quick “wait, wait one second,” then reappeared from behind the doorframe of his bedroom, playing something by what sounded alternately like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Bruce Springsteen. Eddie had thought, for a half-second, that Richie would play his high school love song—hoped, maybe—but instead he started braying, “what I’ve got, you got to give it to your mama! What I’ve got, you got to give it to your papa!” This, it seemed, hadn’t changed: even after twenty years, Richie still had an ‘ironic Chili Peppers’ personality. 

“Stop it, oh my god, stop!” Eddie batted at the guitar, which had turquoise plastic strings and appeared to have been signed by Brad Pitt, of all people. “Your poor neighbors.”

“Ah, they love me,” Richie said, and kept singing: “what I’ve got, you gotta get it put it in you! What I’ve got, you gotta get it put it in you! What I've got, you gotta—” Until Eddie snatched the guitar by the neck, never mind how it stung his palm, and wrenched it from Richie's grasp. 

Richie followed it with tired grabby-grabby hands, and said, “You know, I have a ukulele somewhere. If you didn't like the Chilis then, you sure won’t like them now.” But he made no move to get it, cutting himself off with a shuddering yawn. “What time is it?” 

“Five-forty,” Eddie said. “What time do you usually get up?”

“Two.” Richie said, and his face crumpled into another yawn. “I got up at noon yesterday because I wanted you to think I’m a morning person.”

“Didn’t really work,” he said, unbearably moved by the fact that Richie had woken up 8.5 hours earlier than normal for just—for what? Eddie to get comfortably to the airport? Richie to spend an extra 45 minutes with a one-man adoring audience? Neither seemed quite worth it. 

In the parking lot, when Richie tried to get in on the driver’s side, Eddie threw his arm out, physically barring him. “ _ Please _ let me drive,” Eddie said. “It is too early in the morning for me to fear for my life.”

Richie stumbled back, and Eddie tried not to be disappointed at all. Being disappointed over getting what he wanted without any chest-to-chest arguing was not okay. “Fine, fine,” Richie said. He threw Eddie’s bags into the trunk, one-armed—he was pretty strong, actually, gangly and knobby but strong—and then he got in on the passenger’s side.

Richie had worn a baseball hat to the airport so he wouldn’t get recognized and “repeat Mr. Redgate but with, like, crazy tourists, or businessmen. Actually, you’re kind of both, right?” He made Eddie park in the hourly lot, and then he stood with him right up until he went into PreCheck, yawning a lot and giving Eddie looks that alternated between bleary and happy and sad. Or maybe they were something else. Eddie was way too tired to tell.

Finally, there was only one giggling youth group between Eddie and the ID-checker. He reached out for Richie, and Richie just folded him up and clung, his stubble scraping Eddie’s temple and cheek. Eddie wanted to put his hands under Richie’s weird Neutral Milk Hotel shirt—he wanted, again, to burrow inside of Richie and stay there—but instead he had to take a deep breath and pull away, because he was already running later than he liked, and for every other reason too.

“Eddie,” Richie said softly, then winced like he hadn’t meant to. He cleared his throat. “Get Spotify, okay, man? I’m gonna make you playlists.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Richie said. “I can’t be associated with someone who’s never listened to PJ Harvey, it looks bad.”

Eddie punched him softly in the chest. “Go to hell,” he said, and finally stepped away, thinking hard about the fact that he was associated with Richie now. “Don’t crash your car on the way home, Richie, seriously,” he said. “I don’t want to be responsible for that.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Richie said. “I won’t die because you’d be mad, I got it.”

“I would be  _ really  _ mad, though,” Eddie said. “I would disinter your body to kill you again.” A youth group kid looked at Eddie with alarm, which sent Richie into a hysterical laughing fit.

“Next in line,” the ID-checker yelled. Eddie clapped Richie on the shoulder one last time, a little desperate, and then half-jogged the significant distance between where he’d been standing and the front of the line. Richie stayed where he was, waving when Eddie turned to him, until Eddie was too deep into security to see him anymore.

The last time Eddie had sat in an airport, waiting to go home, he’d known he wasn’t going to cry. Now he thought he might, or laugh, or something else. He wanted to call Richie, though that was fucking crazy. He almost did it, too, before he decided that, one, it would make Richie an even more distracted driver, and, two, that he just couldn’t, because it was  _ insane _ . It was insane, too, that the first reason carried so much more weight than the second. The second carried barely any weight at all.

There had always been someone trying to make Eddie feel better. It was abundantly clear that he had something wrong with him; of course people wanted to give it a go, see if they could reach in and fix whatever it was. No one ever found what they were looking for—the wrong thing wasn’t something you could cut out and extract, it was everywhere, and the more cumulatively pawed-at his insides became the worse it got.

He didn’t expect more than trying—who could ever expect more than trying? So he was grateful, of course. He was very good at being grateful, until something inside him would snap and he would leave whoever was trying alone to die in Derry.

It had been so long since someone actually  _ had _ made Eddie feel better, not surgically but alchemically. With Richie, now, it felt like what Eddie was made of changed. Not that the substance was different, but that it had a new purpose that gave it a new name. Maybe this was why people paid priests to heal them with snakes. Maybe it worked. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> richie is wearing this shirt: https://66.media.tumblr.com/b4437043faa6c5d3ba67a71443ebfb78/tumblr_nhh2zhjOnW1qz9uino1_500.jpg


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings for this chapter: homophobic slurs and a pretty graphic but extremely brief depiction of violence (more info in endnote)

**Eddie**

Eddie hadn’t thought Richie would go through with it, but he did: he made Eddie playlists. Four, in fact, entitled:  _ WHAT YOU MISSED (PSYCHEDELICS) _ ,  _ WHAT YOU MISSED (GAY SHIT) (SORRY) _ ,  _ WHAT YOU MISSED (ANGRY EDS MUSIC) _ and  _ WHAT YOU DIDN’T MISS BUT I KNOW YOU LIKED _ . Eddie tried to play  _ ANGRY EDS MUSIC _ on a run, and he had to dip into a Starbucks bathroom and lock the door and lean against the sink, listening to “Grounded” in a state of utter distress. His heart was beating arrhythmically, and his sweat beaded and condensed against the cold porcelain, and he had forgotten that Richie knew him so well. He’d forgotten that people could know each other like this, actually, forgotten that people did this for each other at all. 

Eddie was struck with the memory of all the mixtapes Richie had made him in highschool, with creative names ( _ miss you spaghetti!!! _ and _ time 2 escape in2 guitars, ya think? _ ) markered on in bubble letters. Except for the “S.” Richie couldn’t do a bubble-letter “S,” so he just ignored them, writing “S” in his regular sloppy print in the middle of words. The tape Richie made for when they were fooling around was, unfortunately, called  _ HELLO SAILOR!! _ Richie had labored over the art for this one so long that he actually had managed a bubble-letter S, albeit a bad one.

Eddie had forgotten what a guitar could sound like, and he was only now remembering. He’d forgotten how much he liked music. Not just music, even. He forgot that there was joy and relief in forcing his emotions out of his ears, tugging at them like streams of magician’s scarves, looking at them, thinking  _ this is okay _ , and shoving them back in. He  _ loved _ music as a kid, and he hadn’t even developed a hobby to take its place as an adult. He didn’t watch television, read fiction, or anything close—he just kept chugging through his life without it. The closest he’d ever gotten was  _ This American Life _ , one episode of which, “Sissies,” had caused him a vehicular panic attack when he heard it on rerun in 2009, due to the unbearable cliche of his life.

But now he felt like a new person, born out of an amniotic sac in the gravelly mud of Derry, neither quite himself nor anyone else. He let tears fall onto his iPhone and washed them away with freezing Starbucks sink-water. He didn't let any water run into his mouth, although they probably used that and worse in their coffee, and kept on running. 

Too soon, he returned home. “Glad you liked the headphones,” Myra said, because—right—they had been a present, one Christmas or anniversary or another. 

“Really do, actually,” Eddie said. “Thanks.”

“Glad you like them,” Myra said again, and left the room. Eddie tried not to think about it and turned up the volume. This was another thing music could do, make Eddie not think about things. He just let it wash over him, erasing the thin chalk mortar between his memories, and remembered without context: Richie snapping his fingers in an elbowy facsimile of a barbershop quartet, high on ketamine and weeping nonsense in Stan’s basement, saying “I love you, I love you, I love you,” but not meaning it. Eddie had pressed kisses onto his forehead, over and over, trying to inhale all of Richie and keep him safe in some corner of Eddie’s brain, until he finally calmed down and went to sleep. The next morning, Richie mentioned nothing. He went out to get himself beat up again and, undeterred, later invited Eddie to some party. 

As a teenager, Richie really came into his words and sense of people and became fucking vicious with both, fuck the consequences. He always had a big mouth—“go blow your dad” was exactly the wrong-right thing to tell Henry Bowers, and Richie could sense it—but it became sharper, meaner. Never to Eddie, though. Eddie always thought Richie would train his blazing eye onto him, see right through him, and say, “good luck with your desperate bids for autonomy,” or something even worse, but he never did. 

In fact, Eddie’d had terrible luck with his desperate bids for autonomy. Nobody was even keeping him trapped, nobody had for 20 years, but he was trapped anyway, and so, so scared. Viking warrior, his ass.

He tried cooking pancakes, while Myra was on a night shift, but he failed about as spectacularly as last time, now with no one to laugh at him. Just his freezing sad kitchen and batter drying on his arm hairs, the stiffening raw egg pulling at his skin. He felt like he was going to puke. So he ran a finger through the cold spilled batter and eggshells and made a smiley face with it on his counter, took a picture, and sent it to Richie.

Richie texted back almost immediately with a link to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and a long chain of various laughing emoji. The music helped. Eddie cleaned his kitchen, and if Myra knew, she said nothing. If she knew about the pancakes, that was. She didn’t know about Richie, which was only a small comfort, but Eddie had been scraping along with smaller comforts than that, so he ought to be fine.

He called Richie almost twice a day now, and they talked for hours, Eddie in his well-lit home office or his car and Richie wandering around with his phone beneath his chin. When Eddie didn’t call, Richie never guilted him about it, never made him feel owned, just looked somewhat hangdog and said, “everything okay, over in the Big Apple?” Eddie always called him, these days. 

Richie told him about bizzare interactions he had with fans—one of them wanted him to sign the collar of a capybara—and Eddie laughed so hard that the computer collapsed in his lap. Once, it grazed his nose. Eddie did bitchy micro-impressions of his coworkers, and Richie, inexplicably, laughed just as hard.

The problem with all the laughing and trying and looking-forward was that Eddie was getting soft. Before Richie, Eddie had no real context for how miserable everything else was—he could slog through his work and his marriage thinking  _ this is just how people treat each other  _ and not even search for someone or something to soothe him. Now, Richie helped him clean the kitchen, Richie gave him new music when he was feeling overwhelmed and talked to him when he was panicking (“I have lymphoma.” “If you do, it won’t kill you. You’re unkillable, Eds. Like a cockroach in the nuclear apocalypse.”), and Richie didn’t think he was crazy. Richie thought he was strong. And he still liked Eddie, which was a miracle in itself. Eddie’s life had spent his life pinballing between people who thought he was strong and didn’t like him (work) and those who thought he was weak and did (Myra). People only loved him because they could take care of him. Sometimes, idiotically, Eddie wondered if Richie could love him, without getting to take care of Eddie so directly, without the opportunity to see himself as someone who took care. Probably not.

He also began caring for Richie, because Richie needed it, and because some evil part of Eddie liked it. Whatever thing had been inside his mother infected him too, and it made him  _ love _ it when Richie called him at 2 pm, drunk and damp-eyed, because he needed somebody to take him off Twitter and tell him he wasn’t a murderer, fucked beyond repair, doomed.

They came to an arrangement: Eddie told Richie that he wasn’t hopeless, and Richie told Eddie that he wasn’t helpless. An exchange. It would be stupid and cruel to ask for more. 

It would be stupid and cruel, but of course this didn’t stop Eddie from setting up a job opening alert for risk management in LA.

Work hadn’t been bad enough to merit this. It had been bad, certainly—he felt like he was thawing in front of an audience of people who’d only ever seen him frozen and who now assumed, reasonably enough, that the liquid issuing from his every surface was the sign of something dire. Maybe it was, but that didn’t make water cooler talk any easier. Still, things were on track to return to normal soon enough, as long as he stopped spacing out so much during meetings and—worse—smiling at his phone.

So Eddie didn’t have any reason plausible enough to explain away what he was doing, even to himself, as he applied to the odd LA job. Doing this was stupid in a sharp-edged, one-note way he’d become entirely unaccustomed to. The reasonable thing would be to call Richie twice a week, start reading a novel, and calm down; the brave thing would be to serve Myra papers. Eddie was splitting the difference by behaving like a cowardly lunatic.

This meant he couldn’t tell himself that he had no other options, either. For his entire adult life, he’d been able to convince himself, whenever he destroyed something, that there was nothing else he could’ve done. It was what he told himself when he married Myra, and it was what he told himself when the housing market crashed. Choicelessness was comforting the way general anesthesia was comforting: it was nauseous and terrifying, but it at least took Eddie offline enough that he didn’t have to really inhabit his life in the wake of whatever he’d done. But the secret job applications were all Eddie—they were a decision so stupid that no one in the world would ever think to strongarm Eddie into making it.

No one except Eddie’s libido. He’d willed it into total submission with a flaming sword of terror about ten years back, but now it was seeping up through the floorboards, inexorable. It would be bad enough if it were just Richie, and certainly it was worst with Richie, but for some reason  _ everything _ , including the steady weight of his Montblanc in his hand, had become horribly charged. One awful morning, Eddie opened the fridge and was mesmerized for a good minute by the brightness of the orange juice in the bottle, its gentle glow, before he slammed the door shut and regained himself. It was like puberty, except possibly even worse, because now he had responsibilities and absolutely no outlet for any of his deranged desires, even his desire to run down the street screaming. He googled  _ high sex drive why, 40 year old too much testosterone _ ,  _ how to lower testosterone, lower testosterone slightly, lower testosterone without muscle loss _ , to no avail. Even jerking off wasn’t outlet enough—he had to go and write cover letters about it.

It was basic cause-and-effect that somewhere wanted to interview him, given the quality of his resume and the perverse speed with which he’d responded to the job listing, but he still dropped his Metro-North ticket in shock when he got the email, then had to get a new one, because no way was he picking it up off the floor in Grand Central. This whole routine distracted him for about three minutes, after which he had a panic attack on the train for an hour and a half. He wasn’t freaking out so badly he couldn’t respond to emails, though—he’d only freaked out that badly once in his life, and it was in the week following his near-death at the hands of an alien clown demon. He replied with his availability.

At dinner with Myra that night, Eddie chewed on his salmon for a long time, because as long as he was chewing he wouldn’t have to speak. Eventually, he’d pulverized it into a texture like watered-down cat food and was forced to swallow. Then he swallowed again, mouth dry. “I have to tell you something,” he said.

Myra raised her eyebrows. “Hm?”

“Nothing bad,” Eddie said, a bald-faced lie. “Something just happened today. I got an interview for a new job.”

Myra raised her eyebrows. “You didn’t tell me you were applying to one.”

“It was on a whim. I didn’t think I’d get it. It’s Credit Suisse,” he added.

She gave him a wary look. “Okay,” she said. “Well, congratulations. When’s the interview?”

“Well,” Eddie said. “They’re, uh. They’re flying me out on Friday.”

He had tried to slip the salient information in under the radar, but it didn’t work. Myra was a very composed person generally, but now Eddie could actually see her jaw drop. “To  _ Switzerland _ ?”

“No, no, not to Switzerland,” Eddie said. He almost, but didn’t quite, burst into hysterical nervous laughter. “It’s their LA office.”

She stared at him in bewilderment for a moment. “ _ Why _ ?”

Eddie’s senses were starting to pale a little, his head going light. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to stay at Morgan, financially,” he said. “I would be getting paid more anywhere else, at this point.”

“You know you’d be able to work your way up again if you stayed,” Myra said. “Or—sure, you could work anywhere else! You could work at Credit Suisse here, in the  _ financial capital of the world _ , Eddie.”

“I know,” he said. “I know, but—”

“You applied to a job on the opposite side of the country,” Myra said, “without telling me.”

“It’s just an interview,” Eddie said. “I don’t even know if I’ll get it.”

“You don’t even know if you’ll—” Myra craned her neck back to look at the ceiling. “You don’t know if you’ll get it. You don’t know what you’ll do if you do. Well, Eddie, I have a life too. I have a job, if you can believe it.”

“I  _ know _ ,” Eddie said. “I know, I wasn’t saying—”

“No, listen to me,” she said. “I have a life here. I’m not moving across the country so you can do a job you could do here in LA.” She was angry enough that her voice had become soft, sad and bitter and determined. She stood up, leaning forward on arms braced against their dining room table, and said “look at me.” Eddie did. Her eyes were watery and flashing. “I need you to recognize that I’m not some prop, and I’m not a pet, and that what you’re asking is incredibly unfair. You do realize that, right?” Eddie said nothing. She was taking very controlled breaths through her nose. “Do you realize that? That this isn’t actually an okay way to treat me?”

Eddie’s mind went blank and white, and he felt himself fall into the same rushing state that he only now remembered from when he was a kid and had the stupid self-righteousness to argue with his mom. He eventually deflated and started mindlessly apologizing and agreeing. He hated when he got like this, afterwards, but now the autopilot saved him from hearing what he was saying and blocked out any cumbersome feelings of dignity. Because he just needed to leave. He just needed to be able to leave.

“Okay. You’re right, okay, you’re right. I’m not leaving, I should have thought about you, and I didn’t and I’m sorry. I’m sorry, honey, Myra, I’m really sorry—” 

“You’re not listening,” Myra said, “you’re just agreeing. You always do this. We need to have a conversation.”

“I’m sorry.”

“But  _ why  _ are you sorry?”

“Because I didn’t think about you. Because I owe you more than that,” he said, quickly.

“That’s what you always say, Eddie. I need you to—I need for you to talk to me like I’m your wife, and not someone who’s holding a gun to your head, because I’m not.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Can you talk about this now?” Myra said, and sighed, hand pulling her cheek down onto her chin. “Or do you need something, first.”

“I really can’t,” Eddie said. “I’m sorry, I’m just on the verge of an asthma attack, and I can’t, but I’m not going to leave. I promise.”

“Okay.”

“I’m sorry.”

Eddie went to go lie down. He stared at the ceiling of his room, breathing hard and hot and dry. It wasn’t fair to Myra, any of it. He almost took a Klonopin, but decided instead to sneak out of his own home, slither into his car and drive, very fast, to nowhere, because it was the only thing besides Richie that made him feel fast and free. He listened to the same song, over and over, until he felt like a speedy buzzing fly that nobody could ever catch or kill. 

**Richie**

Stan invited Richie for Thanksgiving pretty soon after Eddie went back to New York. “Are you spending the holiday with your parents? Do you still talk to them?” he’d asked Richie, calling him while he cleaned up after dinner. Richie had been in the middle of taking a dick pic, but it didn’t really matter, because Stan never FaceTimed him, always just called the old-fashioned way. Richie pulled his boxers up, flicked himself in the face a few times, and he was fine.

“Uh, what do you think?” Richie asked. “I mean, I know I should, but, like. You were kind of my primary dad in high school.”

Stan sighed, not in the disappointed way but in the  _ please don’t say anything gross now  _ way. “Richie,” he said, but didn’t argue. After all, it was Stan who eventually taught Richie to drive, at 18, after many disastrous attempts with his father and a few with Eddie. His dad thought that it was his fatherly duty to teach him—that Richie was a homosexual problem child because he had failed at other critical fatherly duties, and he had damn well better not slack off with the driving. 

Once, their TV antenna had broken right before dinner, and Wentworth had made Richie go to Radio Shack with him to get replacement parts. It was late September and overcast, and the drive there had already been pretty awful, Wentworth yelling MERGE! MERGE! while Richie tried to remember which pedal did what. One was long, and one was wide, but he couldn’t feel the difference through soles of his enormous fuck-ugly army surplus boots and kept getting mixed up. Then his dad made him explain what they needed to the Radio Shack salesguy, which resulted in Richie throwing up his arms and yelling “I don’t fucking know!” and a malevolent look from his dad, who did not like cursing at all. When they left the store, it was full dark with rain, the pine trees along the road waving like sprouts of damp hair. They ran to the car, and Richie tried to get in on the passenger’s side, but Wentworth blocked him physically. Richie was tall, but he didn’t have much mass; Wentworth, on the other hand, was a big guy and, when he tried to be, scary.

“You’re driving,” he said flatly.

“I can’t drive in this,” Richie said, and his voice got reedy like a kid’s. “Seriously, you can’t make me drive in this.”

“Yes, I can,” Wentworth said. They were both soaked by that point, Wentworth’s combover absolutely destroyed by the rain, and Richie felt a sharp pang of mixed fear and disgust.

“I actually can’t,” Richie said. “Dad, I’m scared I’m gonna kill us.”

“You sound like the Kaspbrak boy,” Wentworth said, which meant  _ grow a pair _ . 

Richie stared at him for a second. “Fine,” he said, and jumped into the driver’s side. He didn’t wait for Wentworth to close the door on his side before he peeled out of the spot, watching out of the corner of his eye as mud spattered Wentworth. 

“ _ Richard _ ,” Wentworth shouted, and he sounded kind of scared. Good. Richie didn’t look both ways before he got on the highway. It was almost deserted, and the wind was making steering pretty impossible, not that Richie was really trying. He reached over, left hand barely holding the wheel steady, and flipped through radio stations. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but eventually he found an evangelical station, which inspired him to roll his eyes back in his head and start spasming, throwing his neck back and forth, like he was being exorcised. He jerked the car left and right, and considered telling Wentworth,  _ your mother sucks cocks in hell _ , but whatever little bit of sanity was left in him held him back. 

“RICHARD, CAN YOU JUST BE SERIOUS ONE TIME IN YOUR FUCKING LIFE,” Wentworth screamed, wrestling with Richie for the wheel. He hesitated before he said fucking, and then again after, but he didn’t stop trying to elbow Richie out of the way of the wheel. Maybe he thought that, if Richie heard his dad scream  _ FUCKING _ for the first time, it would convince him.

“Richard, can you just be serious one time in your fucking life?!” Richie shrieked, as gay as he could. Then, he repeated, “Richard. Can. You. Just. Be. Serious. One. Time. In-your-fucking-life,” in the deadest heterosexual robo-dad voice he could muster. He put his knee on the wheel for a few seconds to clap. “Great parenting, Wentworth, Take out the belt,” he finished, and made little whipping sound effects while revving the engine.

By that time, though, Richie couldn’t muster any more violent theatrics, and they were almost home anyway. Wentworth seemed to have gone into temporary shock. He pulled off the highway and parked half on the driveway and half on the lawn. “Guess what dad said to me!” he exclaimed, throwing open the front door. His mom and sisters were leaning over bowls of soup. “The ‘f’ word, and he screamed it!” 

“What’s the ‘f’ word,” Mary-Ellen asked. 

“Faggot!” Richie yelled delightedly, and then his father came barrelling in after him, wool sportcoat dripping on the carpet.

“Tell me that isn’t true, Wentworth,” Maggie said dangerously. 

“Yes, it’s—not that word. But, yes, it is, because the boy was—” he started, and choked. Richie suspected that his father couldn’t even make himself describe what Richie was doing. If he said,  _ he was pretending to have an exorcism in the car to evangelical music, and then he started imitating me in a gay voice and a dead voice and told me to take out the belt _ , that would reflect so badly on him as a father and as a man that he would never leave the house again. 

“There is no excuse for cursing in front of children,” Maggie said, and gave Wentworth a furrowed look that said, very clearly,  _ this is your fault _ : Richie cursing, and everything else.

Richie grinned toothily, secure in the knowledge that he was chipping away at Wentworth’s marriage and soul. He marched over to the liquor cabinet and took two bottles of nice scotch by the neck. “I’m giving these to the Kaspbrak boy,” he said. “They’ll man him up a little.” He left through the kitchen door, slamming it so hard all the windows shook.

So, no, Richie did not talk to his parents.

“We’re going to visit my dad on Thursday, but you’re welcome to come stay with us sometime over the long weekend,” Stan said.

“I don’t have long weekends. I’m funemployed,” Richie said, choosing very maturely not to make a joke about Stan’s dad, since it would reflect too badly on Richie to be worth it.

“Okay,” Stan said, “but Patty and I do. If you want to come up that weekend, you’re welcome to.”

Richie was briefly overwhelmed and had to squeeze his pillow weirdly. “Just me? Sounds like I’m your only friend who’s totally alone in the world,” he said.

“No,” Stan said, “but you’re single, estranged from your parents, and you don’t work regular hours.”

“So, totally alone in the world.”

“Is that why Eddie flew out to see you with four days’ notice because he thought you were sad?” Stan said, which actually shut Richie up, and he agreed to fly out the morning after Thanksgiving.

Stan picked Richie up at the airport in an immaculately clean Prius. “That’s all your luggage?” he asked, as Richie threw a backpack into the trunk.

“Oh, yeah. Sorry, dude. I left all the cockrings at mine.”

“If you say anything like that in front of my wife,” Stan said, “your life will be over. Do you understand?”

“Sure, sure,” Richie said, and gave Stan a hug. “Thanks for picking me up,” he said, awkwardly sincere, because it really was nice of him.

“It’s impossible to get an Uber out here,” Stan said. “And, frankly, I don’t trust drivers on Black Friday.” 

“What is  _ trusting drivers _ ? All you talk about is  _ trusting drivers _ , Stanley. What are you trusting these people with?”

“Not to cause an accident.”

“Is there any time when you do trust them?”

“I don’t think the promise of outlet sales makes them  _ more  _ trustworthy,” Stan said. 

They went on like this for awhile, then switched to life-updates, which Stan had never stopped expecting Richie to at least try to do in something approximating a normal way. “How’ve you been doing with it?” Stan asked, meaning  _ being publicly gay _ .

“We talked on the phone about this like last week,” Richie said. “I haven’t gotten hate-crimed since then.”

“How are things with your manager?” Stan asked, totally undissuaded.

Richie shrugged. “He has a shitty job,” Richie said. “How’s things with the people you manage? Financially?”

“That isn’t really what accounting is.”

“Look, I have an accountant. I know what you do.”

“An accountant, Richie? That’s impressive.”

“Hell  _ yeah  _ it’s impressive,” Richie said. 

“You must be very, very famous.”

“You know it. They got my face on billboards.”

“Uh-huh,” Stan said. “Things are fine with my business, by the way.”

“That’s all I wanted to know,” Richie said, trying to do a Stan voice but failing yet again to get beyond the gay-history-teacher impression. God dammit, the guy was good. He was un-send-up-able.

“This neighborhood looks like  _ Edward Scissorhands _ ,” Richie said, as Stan parked.

“No, it does not,” Stan said. “There are a lot of trees.”

“Okay, it looks like  _ The Virgin Suicides _ .”

“We grew up in a suburban area,” Stan said. “You don’t really need to consult all these movies for a reference point.”

“Oh, look who remembers his childhood,” Richie said. “Wow. Low blow, Stanley.”

“I forgot too,” Stan said, and got Richie’s bag for him. “You don’t have a monopoly on that joke.”

“But what if I’m very special,” Richie said, following Stan into his nice brick house. It looked a lot like the Uris house in Derry, but bigger and nicer. The fact that Stan lived here made Richie happy to a kind of embarrassing degree. “You’ll be in the basement,” Stan said. “It’s finished.”

“Yeah, no, I wasn’t assuming you were, like, locking me in a cellar.”

“Sometimes, Richie,” Stan said, hoisting Richie’s suitcase and carrying it down the steps. “Sometimes I think about it.”

The basement also looked almost exactly like the old Uris basement, just with less wood paneling and a nicer TV. “Just like old times, huh,” Richie said. In high school Richie had spent more nights in that basement than he could possibly count, often many consecutively. After he’d almost totalled his dad’s car, for example, Richie biked over to Stan’s, where he was given Stan’s mathletes team jersey and corduroy pants that came about halfway down Richie’s calves and went  _ shuck shuck shuck  _ when he walked. Rabbi Uris made Richie eat leftover cream of spinach, and Richie was so beaten-down by the day’s events that he didn’t even protest. He’d slept on Stan’s beige sectional and borrowed an old notebook from him to take to school the next day.

Rather than getting his act together whenever he lived with the Urises, Richie tended to behave even more badly. For whatever unfathomable reason, Rabbi Uris was nice to Richie unconditionally, didn’t even get mad when he snuck Eddie into the basement at 3 am and the downstairs window clattered shut behind him, or when Richie made the entire basement smell like weed. Rabbi Uris was unattached to Richie in the best possible way: Richie was not his son, not his responsibility, and whatever was wrong with him could be blamed—rather unfairly—on Wentworth. The only thing he ever got in trouble with Rabbi Uris for was cigarettes, which Wentworth would confiscate, then douse in soap, if he smelled them.

In retrospect, Richie thought Rabbi Uris was probably assuming that Richie would die if he didn’t have somewhere to stay other than his parents’ house, which might have been true. Maybe Stan had invited Richie now because he assumed the same thing.

“Okay,” Stan said, after dropping Richie’s bag. “Well, I have yardwork.” He gave Richie a meaningful look.

“You want me to sunbathe on the roof? Give you a nice distraction?”

“No,” Stan said. “Actually, I want you to rake.”

That was exactly what ended up happening, more or less, but only for a very limited value of ‘rake.’ Richie was trying to remember whether this was the first time he had ever in his life raked leaves, and, based on his beginning skill level, he had to assume the answer was no. He had sweat through his t-shirt within five minutes of starting, and now he was pretty much brining. The problem was that Stan’s yard was a) enormous and b) had a huge hill that Richie had to keep walking up and down to get all the leaves. Richie also kept forgetting to apply enough pressure to the rake on the way down, which meant he had to go right back up and try again.

Stan was doing some arduous gardening task that involved huge clippers and a ladder, very quickly and precisely. Stan had assigned Richie the raking task with an  _ earn your keep  _ argument, but the longer it took Richie and the worse of a job he did, the more Richie thought that it had more to do with making him build character or something. That’s why Stan had worked at Hannaford on the weekends for the last two years of high school. Stan’s character had gotten built, alright—he had the most structurally sound character of anyone Richie had ever met. Richie, on the other hand, was a forty-year-old who woke up at 2 pm every day, didn’t talk to his parents, and could barely scrape leaves over from one side of the yard to the other. He was probably a lost cause.

Richie tried, with little success, to shove a bunch of leaves into a garbage bag, and Stan walked over. “You look like you’re about to have a hernia,” he commented.

“Fuck you,” Richie said. “Fuck you and your topiary.”

“It’s hardly a topiary,” Stan said, then he reached a hand out for Richie’s rake. “I’m going to teach you a better technique.”

“Ooh,” Richie said, but before he could add anything horrible, his phone started buzzing in his pocket. “Hold on,” he said, and fished it out, ready to silence it if it were Steve. It wasn’t—it was Eddie. Richie turned to Stan with delight and said, “Eddie!”; Stan took a step back.

Richie slid to answer. “Dude,” he said. “Dude. Guess where I am.”

“Based on Stan being there,” Eddie said, “I’m gonna guess you’re at Stan’s.”

“Hi, Eddie,” Stan said. “How was your Thanksgiving?” 

“We didn’t do much,” Eddie said. “Myra was working. She’s a physician assistant at Mount Sinai, and a lot of people called out. Because of the holiday.” He said this all in a very normal way, like he was being possessed by a heterosexual quant. Which was how he lived his entire life, Richie guessed.

Richie and Stan’s faces must have been doing something, because Eddie looked acutely freaked out for a second and then said, sounding more like yourself, “How are you, Stan? It’s been awhile!”

Stan started talking about fuel efficiency, which Eddie had something to say about too, and Richie’s eyes glazed over out of teenage muscle memory. He tuned in a few times, hoping for something to make fun of, but all he gleaned was that Eddie and Stan were being super weird to each other. It was a little difficult to discern whether they were being weirder than they normally were to each other, at first, but then Richie realized, yes, obviously. Stan probably still thought Richie was wrecking Eddie’s home.

He tuned in again when they were doing their weird nerdy goodbyes. “Okay, Eddie,” he said, “I’m gonna show you Stan’s sex dungeon.” He turned to Stan. “I’m sorry, man.”

“I’m going to show you the technique later,” Stan said. “I’m serious.”

Richie licked his teeth and said, “I hope so,” which neither Stan nor Eddie liked at all.

“Okay, check this out,” Richie said, once he was back in the basement. He positioned the camera to capture as much as possible of the idyllic professional-managerial-class tableau behind him—the wine rack, the elliptical, the beige sectional.

“That is uncanny,” Eddie said. “It looks exactly like the old basement.”

“I  _ know _ ,” Richie said, standing and flipping the camera around. “Look at this.” He walked over to the huge framed Cézanne print by the bookshelf. “His dad had literally this exact poster.”

“He did!” Eddie smiled with dimples. He was leaning his elbows on his desk, wearing a kind of tight t-shirt, and smiling with dimples. The world was so fucked up.

“So what’s up with you?” Richie asked, mainly to make himself snap out of it.

“Wait, Rich, flip the camera back,” Eddie said. “I can’t see you.”

_ He wants to see you _ , Richie thought insanely. Of course he wanted to see Richie—that’s how FaceTime worked—but there was something wrong with Richie’s brain. “There you go,” he said, making sure the camera was at a really horrible angle under his jaw. “This what you wanted?”

“Yeah, exactly,” Eddie said. “Your nose hairs were exactly what I wanted to see when I called you. Actually, the rest of you isn’t even part of the equation.”

“At least you’re honest,” Richie said. “Men only want one thing: washed-up stand-up comedian nose hairs.”

“Only really long ones,” Eddie said, which was so funny Richie tripped trying to sit back on the sectional. He hit his hip on the armrest.

“Fuck, ow,” he said, collapsing onto his side. “Okay, well, now you’ve seen the daily agony behind these long, long nose hairs.”

“The mystery is gone,” Eddie said.

“God dammit. Well, I, for one, still want to know what’s up with you.”

Eddie’s jaw moved for a second. “I actually, uh,” he said. “I have news, I guess.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I’ve been applying to jobs. Things at Morgan have been—” Eddie cleared his throat. “They’re sort of blackballing me. Not really, but. Well. You don’t want to hear about the specifics, I’m sure.”

“Of course I want to,” Richie said. “I just won’t understand them.”

“Okay, well, it isn’t important. I—um, I got an interview. I’m getting flown out next week.”

“That’s awesome, dude!” Richie said. Then—“Wait, the job isn’t in New York?”

“Uh,” Eddie said. He cleared his throat. “It’s actually in LA.”

Richie just stared at the screen for awhile, so long that Eddie said, “Richie, are you still there? I think you’re breaking up.”

“No, yeah, I’m here,” Richie said, and then, “holy  _ shit _ . Are you serious?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “Yeah, I am. Are you—mad?”

“Am I  _ mad _ ? Eddie, I’m fucking—” Richie had stood up and was kind of abortively pacing around the basement, occasionally bumping into the sectional. “I’m not mad at all. I’m the opposite of mad. So, like, ecstatic.”

Eddie exhaled loudly. “Okay. That’s—thank you. It’s just, Myra’s mad. And—I don’t mean to impose or anything. It’s just—a good job, and—”

“Dude, you think you’re  _ imposing _ ?” Richie said. “I’m the one who’s gonna be imposing, if you move to LA. I’m gonna be up your ass 24/7.” Eddie turned bright red, and Richie pointed at the camera. “Nope, that is totally a saying. I’m not being annoying, I’m using a very normal saying.”

“I don’t think that’s what it means.”

“Oh, yeah? What does it mean?”

“It means licking someone’s boots. Or, I don’t know. Kissing their ass.”

“Okay, well, I can do that too, if you want.” Now Eddie turned purple. “Sorry, sorry! I’m being annoying now.”

“Yep, you are,” Eddie said.

“You’re—Jesus,” Richie said. “When are you flying out? You can stay with me. I mean, maybe not the best environment for seeming professional, I don’t think I have an iron, but, like. If you want to stay with me, you should stay with me.”

“Well, I do. Want to stay with you, I mean. Obviously.”

“Okay.” Richie giggled hysterically. “Okay, well. Cool.”

“And I’m coming Friday morning,” Eddie said. “This Friday. I’m going straight to the interview from the airport, actually. But if I could stay with you that night, that’d be great.”

“Awesome,” Richie said. “That is so, so awesome. I’ll actually clean this time, you aren’t gonna know what hit you.”

“The problem with your apartment isn’t cleanliness,” Eddie said. “It’s furniture. Where do you even get your furniture?”

Richie thought about that. “Honestly, the side of the road,” he said. “I guess also Goodwill? I used to get it from people in my sketch group when they moved to New York.”

“You’ve had the same furniture for  _ fifteen years _ ?”

“It still works.”

“That stool broke!” Eddie exclaimed. “It did not work!”

“Yeah, well, you fixed it,” Richie said.

Eddie was smiling through a glare, or glaring through a smile. It was one of his best faces. “Have you heard of IKEA?” he asked.

“Yeah, I’ve heard of IKEA,” Richie said. “You think that little of me?”

“Have you ever been inside of an IKEA?”

Richie cleared his throat.

“Richie, what the fuck?” Eddie said. “Seriously, what?”

“Why would I go into IKEA?”

“For furniture.”

“I have furniture.”

“You have sketch comedian furniture.”

“Okay,” Richie said, “to be fair, that isn’t necessarily any worse than stand-up comedian furniture.”

“You have early-aughts sketch comedian with no money furniture.”

“Fine,” Richie said. “I mean, I literally can’t argue with that, because it’s true.”

“That’s the whole point,” Eddie said. “I wouldn’t have said it if there were anything to argue with.”

Richie reemerged from the basement feeling like he’d just been hit with a Mack truck filled with 80,000 pounds of pure love. He must’ve looked it, too, because Stan squinted at him from across the yard and asked, “what happened to you?”

“Nothing,” Richie said, wandering over to him. “Actually, I’ve got Ryan Gosling tied to the sectional down there. Kidding. Just talked to Eddie.”

Stan looked at him for a second, then turned back to the bricks he was minutely adjusting. “Uh huh,” he said.

“What?” Richie said, too wired not to jump on it. “Do you hate Eddie now or something? You were being really fucking pissy earlier.”

“I was  _ not _ being pissy,” Stan said. “Obviously I don’t hate Eddie. Don’t even say that, Richie, it isn’t funny.”

“Okay, well, you look pissed whenever he comes up.”

“It’s—” Stan sighed loudly. “You talk to him every day?”

“Not, like, on a schedule,” Richie said, though, of course, it basically was on a schedule. “I mean, most days. He’s my friend, dude.”

“Yeah, I know,” Stan said. “You’re my friend, too, and I don’t call you every day.”

“Oh, you’re jealous?” Richie asked. “Sorry, Stanley, I forgot we were monogs.”

“Richie, just  _ listen to me _ ,” Stan said. He stood and crossed his arms. “You remember when he almost shot you?”

In high school, Richie had a steady stream of access to brown liquor, cigars, and, most importantly, guns, through his father, who seemed to earnestly believe that the best way to straighten out his maniac of a gay son was to give him unlimited access to the most phallic symbols of rugged masculinity. Richie, being equally incapable of seeing, aiming, and enjoying violence with a primary end other than his own physical ruin, had distributed the guns among his friends. Stan and Ben hadn’t liked them; Mike was too used to them to see them as at all glamorous; Bill thought they were fun; and Eddie was  _ obsessed _ with them, in a way that Richie loved so much he could hardly stand it. He loved Eddie’s shockingly good aim, his solemn eyes when he was setting up, his slow grin when he made a difficult shot. He was always willful, but when he had a gun in his hand Eddie was basically pure will, an unstoppable force sailing through the air at the speed of sound. 

They’d set up bottles in the Barrens, and Eddie would knock them out, and Richie would sometimes run out while Eddie was still holding the gun to set up more, overwhelmed by insane glee and desire. Stan would usually just grab Richie by the collar and say “five minutes, wait  _ five minutes _ ,” but one time Richie cut it a little too close—Eddie hadn’t even lowered the gun, much less put the safety on—and Stan pulled him aside and said, very quietly, “If Eddie hurt you, he’d never forgive himself. Come on, Richie.”

Richie had started to weep uncontrollably, and everyone had wheeled on Stan, Eddie most of all. No one had heard what he’d actually said. “Why’d you make him fucking cry, dude? What’s your problem?” Eddie had demanded, and actually shoved Stan in the chest. “You really take it too fucking far sometimes.”

“My problem is I don’t want you to shoot Richie in the head,” Stan said. “ _ I’m  _ the one who’s taking it too far, because of that?”

Eddie had blanched, then, and put down the gun. “I’m going home,” he’d said, and got in his car. They pretty much stopped shooting bottles after that.

Stan had known back then, Richie realized.  _ Taking it too far _ : that’s what Stan had meant.

“Yeah,” Richie said, “and you were so homophobic about it that you made him leave?”

“It was not homophobic for me to not want you to get shot,” Stan said. “Do you hear yourself? You can’t possibly think that was okay. Your brain has matured past seventeen,  _ at least _ .”

That was—actually true. “Okay,” Richie said. “Okay, but, like. I can’t believe I have to make the fucking argument to you that Eddie’s a good dude. What the hell, man? He killed the fucking clown.”

“I know Eddie’s a good dude,” Stan said. “When did I say he wasn’t?”

“When you said he was gonna shoot me in the head!”

“That’s—look,” Stan said. “Eddie is a really, really good person. He’s a wonderful person and friend. But—there was nothing he could do that would make you say no to him, in high school. Nothing.”

Richie took a step back, off the lawn and onto the patio. Like the patio would make Stan believe him. “Fuck off,” he said. “Seriously, what the fuck? You think he was, what, fucking pressuring me?”

“Of course not,” Stan said, “but if he had been, would it have mattered to you?”

“That’s,” Richie said, and then he got hit by such a strong wave of pure sadness that he had to sit down on Stan’s cast iron outdoor bench, elbows on his knees. Stan wiped his hands on his pants and sat next to him.

He cast around for something funny-cruel to say, but he couldn’t think of a single one. Instead, he said,“If anyone was pressuring anyone, it was me. I wouldn’t leave him alone. He just wanted to get out of Derry and I was, like, hounding him that whole year.”

“You weren’t asking him to stay.”

“Yeah, but I wanted him to take me with him,” Richie said. “Which is—I mean, that’s not better. His mom would’ve made him take her with him, too.”

“Richie—” Stan said, and sighed. “I don’t think it ever bothered him that he was important to you. I think it bothered him that he couldn’t tell whether he was or not, and he did things he shouldn’t have because he didn’t know he was.”

“Yes, he fucking did know.”

“No, he didn’t, because you  _ weren’t _ like his mom.”

“So, what the hell, you think I should’ve been  _ more  _ like his mom?”

“Obviously not,” Stan said. “I’m not telling you what I think you did wrong. We were teenagers. I’m telling you I don’t want you to get hurt now. Okay?” He raised his eyebrows at Richie. “Okay, Richie?”

Richie looked at the ground and laughed lightly, painfully. “You  _ really _ sound like a dad. Like, a good dad,” he said. When Stan didn’t answer, Richie looked up at him. He looked—really upset, actually. “Oh, shit, dude,” Richie said, “I’m sorry.” 

“It’s fine,” Stan said, and cleared his throat.

“No, it’s—fuck.” Richie swallowed. “It’s not, really. It’s not fucking fair.”

“Well, nothing is,” Stan said, with a little eye roll, and Richie laughed again, because if there was anyone who regularly made the world fairer through sheer force of will, it was Stan. “I just—yeah. I wish I could’ve been. A dad, I mean.”

“Yeah, but—okay, listen,” Richie said. He took a deep breath, steeling himself. “The worst thing about Derry was that it was full of people doing really fucking horrible things, and none of it was really their fault—”

“It  _ was _ their fault,” Stan said. “Richie, Bowers was—”

“No, Stan, listen to me. I’m not talking about morality, okay. It’s like—Bowers was a garden-variety dick before the clown got to him, and he wouldn't even have been that if his dad wasn’t such an evil, crazy asshole. And his dad lived through the clown, too. He’d have been our age.” Richie looked at his hands. Derry’s accumulation of haunted places and people resulted in him splitting open the back of someone’s rib cage. Bowers had bitten his tongue, when he died, and his shirt rode up to show that the dimpled fat of his gut, collapsed onto the floor, was lined with inexplicably long, transparent hairs. Richie wondered if he’d been gay. 

“Hey, Rich?” Stan said. Richie realized he had trailed off. “Bowers wasn’t your fault, man.”

“It’s not about Bowers, that’s what I’m trying to say. Eddie’s mom lived through the clown too, and all of our parents. It left enough people alive in Derry to reproduce and be fucked up and not remember why. And they were all shitty parents to lonely, terrified kids, and they couldn’t even fucking empathize because they didn’t remember what being a kid in Derry was like.” He took a shuddering breath. “Except your dad. I don’t know how that happened.”

“Yeah,” Stan said quietly.

“So—It wasn’t a hunter, okay? It was a farmer. It just—bred us, like animals, and made new generations of alone people with short memories. I mean, why do you think it came back every 27 years? Perfect timing.” Richie was running out of steam—it had been between two and three decades since he’d made a serious fucking St. Crispin’s Day speech like this—so he said the rest quickly, before he started to make fun of himself and everyone else. “And it’s not fucking fair, the ways we had to martyr ourselves. I mean—Stan, I’m  _ irreparably _ fucked, I’m never coming back from any of this shit—but you’re not doing what the clown wanted. You aren’t breeding for it, and you  _ do _ remember. And you’re not alone. So you’re pissing on the grave of that dead sewer-demon every day you’re alive.”

“Who sounds like a dad now?” Stan said, dabbing at his eyes with his windbreaker sleeve.

“Maybe a fucking crazy dad,” Richie said. “Does your dad use martyr as a verb?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, well, my dad doesn’t. Not that he’s a great model. Better than me, though, shit. And—actually, I shouldn’t have said that, he really tried. Poor fucker.” Wentworth had wanted the best for Richie, and the best wasn’t being a cruel, crazy, blind faggot who couldn’t drive. He never said it, but Richie knew it was true. The worst his father had done, he’d done out of hope for Richie, that he’d be a good kid someday, or, short of that, a good man. Richie hadn’t ended up ever being either.

Stan sighed and ran his hands through his hair. “We’ve gotta finish before it gets dark out,” he said. “Richie—you know we all love you. Including me, and—” he looked very hard at something in the distance— “Eddie, obviously. He really does. We really do.”

“So does Bev,” Richie said, and made some choice gestures, winking. 

“Okay, that was never a funny joke. It was never even a joke.”

“Wait, okay, can I ask you something?” Richie said, following Stan back out to the yard.

Stan turned to look at him. “Yeah, of course.”

“So, okay—the basement’s bringing back some memories, and—”

“Oh no,” Stan said.

“You said you knew, and I’m just wondering—”

“I don’t really want to relive this.”

“So you could hear.”

“Yes, Richie,” Stan said. “I could hear you, in  _ my _ basement, crushing up lots of drugs on the mirror you took from  _ my _ room, watching  _ Golden Girls  _ reruns on  _ my _ TV, and having sex with  _ my _ friend. Also, not getting in trouble with  _ my _ dad. Are you happy?”

“Stan,” Richie said solemnly, “I am sorry.”

“Time for you to learn the technique,” Stan said, wielding the rake like he was in “American Gothic.”

At dinner, Stan promised that he would do shrooms with Richie the next time they saw each other, on the condition that Richie would play HORSE in the driveway with him for at least two hours on Saturday. “You drive a hard bargain,” Richie said. “A hard, sadistic bargain.” He turned to Patty. “Imagine me playing basketball, and then ask yourself: is my husband a sadist? Is he a sadist who wants his oldest friend to die?”

Patty laughed. “I have it on good authority that isn’t true.”

“You wouldn’t know, Patty,” Richie said. “It’s like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with this guy.”

The next day, they played HORSE, and Stan wasn’t even distracted enough by Richie’s impersonation of their gym teacher to for one second stop elbowing Richie out of the way and lapping him obnoxiously. Afterwards, Stan worked for awhile, sitting at the dining room table and touch-typing on his big Windows laptop with a million binders open in front of him. Richie sat across from him. “Okay, so, this is kind of weird,” Richie said. “Your wife especially might think this is kind of weird.” 

Stan looked at him with bafflement. “My wife definitely does not think this is weird,” he said, gesturing at the table. “It’s my job.”

“No,” Richie said. “I obviously mean what I’m about to do. Your wife might think what I’m about to do is weird.”

“Patty really likes you,” Stan said, but he started to look wary. “That said—Richie, please don’t give me a gag gift. Just—knowing that you aren’t giving me a gag gift is gift enough.”

“Oh, no,” Richie said. “It isn’t a gag gift. It’s the opposite of a  _ gag _ gift. It’s like a deep—”

“No,” Stan said. “Do not finish that sentence.”

“Fine, but only because I’m already giving you this super fucking weird thing. It’s not even a gift, that’s what I was saying. It’s a gift the way adopting an orca in someone’s name is a gift: not at all.”

Stan pushed his glasses on top of his head and leaned back. “Richie.”

“Okay! Okay,” Richie said, and he dug around in his pocket for a second before he found the Audubon Society keychain he’d been looking for. He slapped it on the table.

Stan squinted down at the table and up at Richie. “Richie, did you buy me a car?” he asked. “Come on. You can’t do that.”

“No, dude,” Richie said. “You think this looks like a car key?”

Stan squinted a little more, then his face started to relax with what looked like horror. “Did you buy me a  _ house _ ? Richie, you  _ absolutely  _ cannot—”

“No! Stanley, Jesus Christ, why the fuck would I buy you a house!”

“You present me with a key, then you ask me why you would buy me a house,” Stan said. “Richie. How many of the things you do make any sense to me, do you think? Approximately what percentage of the time do you think I see the internal logic behind your actions? It’s five. Five percent.”

“Well, I didn’t buy you a house.” When he didn’t say anything else, Stan made a face of extreme exasperation. “Jesus, dude, I get it! Okay. Fine. It’s, uh. It’s to my apartment. In case you ever come to LA and I’m busy. Not that that would ever happen, but, uh. If it did.”

Stan just looked at him for a minute. Then he said, “Richie, did you get me this because you think you’re going to die in there and you want me to be the one who finds the body?”

Richie didn’t feign shock, because, as it turned out, he wasn’t always a complete asshole. “No,” he said. “Seriously, no.”

“Okay.”

“Dude, I’m not even kidding. I want the opposite of that. Not, like, someone other than you finding the body. I just—uh. I think I’m less likely to die if you have this? Because you’re, um. Important to me. And I guess I’m, like.” He scratched his neck insanely. “Important to you.”

Stan looked at him for a moment longer, then finally picked up the key. “Thank you, Richie. For the key. And for saying that.”

“I mean it, man,” Richie said.

“I know you do. I wouldn’t be thanking you otherwise.”

Stan hesitated before putting the key in his pocket. “Are you sure about this?”

“Uh, yeah. I can’t really see you breaking and entering, dude.”

“If I ever walk in on you, I won’t forgive you,” Stan said, but he hooked it onto the ring with his other keys anyway.

**Eddie**

The interview was very, very normal. This was the situation Eddie had been least prepared to handle. If they’d offered Eddie the job on the spot, he would’ve been backed into one corner; if he’d bombed, he would’ve been backed into another. As it was, he shook everyone’s hands, walked out to the lot where he’d parked his Zipcar, and thunked his head against the steering wheel several times in quick succession.

He knew what he had to do, but he only had one bar (reception, not Xanax) in the parking lot, so he had to drive out to the street. It was almost impossible to find a spot, which blessedly and horribly killed another half hour. He didn’t listen to music. Finally, he found a spot by a golf course. It was violently Los Angeles in a way he thought he probably deserved, considering everything.

He tried to convince himself that Richie didn’t exist so that he could imagine that he had any kind of moral high ground here. But this just made him wonder with real terror why he was doing it at all. He didn’t have any moral high ground at all, really, even if you took Richie out of the equation. Marriage meant you supported someone, you built a life together, and they trusted you because you had made a promise. Promises meant something—wasn’t that the reason they’d all gone back to Derry, that promises meant something?

Eddie had to think about Richie to calm down, then. Not because he was a good reason, but because he was Richie, and it helped to remember he was in the same city as Eddie, watching TV sprawled upside-down on his couch or lying facedown on the floor with his huge headphones on.

Eddie finally pulled out his phone. He hovered over the call button for what felt like forever, hands sweating, and ended up having to count down from 10 to make himself press it. Myra picked up almost immediately. “Hi, Eddie,” she said.

“Hi,” he said. He was so fucking out-of-his-mind terrified that he almost added, ‘honey,’ but he stopped himself at the last second. “I—is this a good time?”

“How’d the interview go?” she said, instead of responding.

“It was okay,” Eddie said. His whole body was shaking. “I think I have a shot.”

There was a rustling sound, like a phone being picked up or set down. When Myra spoke again, her voice was clipped. “Okay. Let’s just—god dammit, Eddie,” she said. “I’m not going to try to convince you. If you move to LA, you know I’m not coming with you.”

For a long time, Eddie didn’t say anything. He looked out the dashboard at the palm trees and asphalt and strange West Coast light. He looked at his hands and the inside of the Camry he’d rented. Finally, he ran his tongue over the scar on the inside of his cheek and took a deep breath. “I’m going to move to LA,” Eddie said. “Whether or not I get it.”

Myra was quiet for a while, not as long as Eddie had been. “Do I know her?” she said softly.

“What?”

“You owe it to me not to play dumb right now,” Myra said. “Honestly, it’s the least you can do.”

“I know. I’m sorry. Um.” Eddie turned to lean his forehead against the window. “Nothing’s happened,” he said finally. “I’m not seeing anyone.”

“There’s someone, though.”

“Nothing’s happened,” he said again.

“Eddie,” she repeated.

If he started lying now, then none of this would even matter, he realized with renewed terror. He still couldn’t tell the truth, he wasn’t brave enough for that, but he would be truly fucked if he lied. He took an impossible breath and said, “yes,” his voice a horrible pitchy croak. “There is, but—”

“That’s what I asked.” There was silence for a moment, then the sound of wet breathing. “This is so fucking humiliating,” she said. 

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I am so, so sorry. I mean it.”

“Do I know her?” she asked again.

“No.”

“Is it that woman you had dinner with?”

“No.”

“Are you lying?”

“No,” Eddie said. “No, I’m not.”

He was holding his knees to his chest like a kid, leaning his whole body forward against the wheel. He used to drive out to the Barrens and play tapes he’d copied from Richie, sitting like this, never crying but often screaming. He briefly considered what anyone walking by might think of him now and realized he didn’t have whatever it took to care.

“I wish you hadn’t married me in the first place,” Myra said. “I—well. I don’t think I want to know why you did.”

“Myra,” he said again, “I’m sorry,” but it was so different from the way he usually said it that it might as well not have been the same word. It was truer now, but it meant less than ever, because he wasn’t going to do anything about it. He was sorry, and there wasn’t a thing he could—would, actually—do to stop being sorry.

“I’m going to go,” Myra said, and Eddie didn’t ask if he could fix it, or tell her he loved her, or apologize again. He just let her hang up. Then he got out of his car, walked in circles around LA for two hours, came back to a parking ticket, and drove to Richie’s. 

**Richie**

Eddie arrived at Richie’s in a full suit. Richie’d seen his finance getup over FaceTime, of course, but this was the first he’d gotten a chance to look at it in person. It was so apocalyptically sexy that Richie felt a little worried that he was having a heart attack, which would have at least been an excuse to be wheeled out on a stretcher, but there was nothing pressingly wrong with him physically. Just psychologically. 

“Eds!” He said, a little too loud, and Eddie looked at him with big, sad eyes under furrowed brows and a wobbly attempt at a smile. He jerked his limbs forward into the apartment, into the light, like a stiff robot. Now, Richie could see that his jaw was twitching. He was holding his neck so tense that he looked like a lizard’s. His shoulders were ratcheted up to his ears. 

“Sorry I’m late,” Eddie said.

“No, dude, don’t be sorry,” Richie said. “Seriously, do not. I used the extra time to clean out my microwave. Do you think I’ve ever done that before?”

“Ugh,” Eddie said. “Richie, really?”

“I did it once,” Richie said. “Because some soup exploded in there in, like, 2012. Not since then.”

Eddie walked over to the microwave and looked inside. “Looks good,” he said. “You use vinegar?”

Richie sniffed the air. It didn’t smell like vinegar to him, and he couldn’t remember using vinegar recently, but he could only assume that Eddie smelled vinegar-stink somewhere. Oh, god. What if it was his armpits? Richie silently calculated all the ways he could get away with subtly sniffing his underarms without looking like a caveman-dog. “On what?”

“The microwave?”

“What?”

“To clean it.” 

Richie was either incredibly stupid, and cleaning with condiments was a normal thing to do, or Eddie was incredibly weird. It was difficult to tell, because both were true. “Is that, like, normal? Cleaning with vinegar? Because I had no idea that was a thing.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty normal, Richie,” he said, both more rapidly and more dully than usual. 

He sounded so miserably stressed and exhausted that Richie stopped trying to distract him with his own goofiness and said, “No offense, but you look really tense. Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “I—yeah. The interview was fine. I might’ve gotten it. But.” He tapped his fingers rapidly against his leg. “Yeah.”

Richie had no idea what absolutely any of that signified, given that his last job interview had been for washing dishes at a brutally understaffed gourmet donut shop in 2005, but he figured it wasn’t good. “Well, you look like your shoulders are bags of marbles,” he said, moving tentatively behind Eddie, and rested his hands on said shoulders, emboldened by the rabid desire to make Eddie feel better. Also, by the far more selfish desire to test the waters and figure out if Eddie still wanted him at all, whether he had any kind of shot here. He wasn’t that hot anymore, and he’d certainly moved from one end of the niche appeal spectrum to the other, but he was never particularly sexy to start with, and maybe Eddie would have some use for him as a sounding board for his second gay sexual awakening, if he ended up deciding to have it. He did the first time. “I’m actually pretty good at massages. Too much time in LA. You want me to get your shoulders?”

Eddie turned toward him, looking sort of mystified, and said, “That’d be really nice, actually. Thanks, Richie.” He shrugged off his suit jacket, draping it over the stool he’d ended up fixing, and sat on the one that was safe for sure.

The problem with giving Eddie a massage from the back, Richie realized quickly, was that he couldn’t see Eddie’s face from this position, so there was no way to father any kind of intel. Also, Eddie’s back felt like it was full of walnuts.

Richie dug his thumbs in, gently at first, and Eddie moaned. “Harder, Richie,” he said. “I’m not gonna break.” Richie went blind for a second. He had miscalculated, he realized. He was not some kind of brilliant puppetmaster; Eddie was married, and Richie was just fucked. Then Eddie said, “Yeah, right there. Damn, Richie, that’s good,” which pretty much sealed the deal. Richie could not just concentrate solely on working out the knots in Eddie’s back, as he would have liked. He also had to concentrate on not popping a boner.

“Fuck,  _ fuck _ . Perfect, that’s perfect,” Eddie said, and his head lolled back. Richie was terrified for a second that they’d make eye contact, in which case Richie would absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, pop a boner. “How long can you keep doing this?” The way Eddie stuttered out “ _ doi-ing this” _ made Richie deeply regret ever remembering what he sounded like when Richie was blowing him. 

“That feel good?” Richie said with slightly the wrong intonation, verging accidentally on a gravelly whine.

Eddie exhaled, sharply, whistling through his nostrils, the way he’d done a few times over the course of the weekend he’d been in LA, and Richie suddenly realized where he remembered that from, too. It was what Eddie used to do when he was trying to teach Richie to drive, what he used to do when Richie handed him his dad’s guns. It was his main tell, other than making his eyes impossibly bigger than usual and just kind of staring.

Most of what it indicated was that he felt briefly powerful, which Richie didn’t begrudge him at all. A massive piece of motor-operated metal, a firearm, Richie: those were pretty much the sum-total of things Eddie had any kind of control over, when they were kids. It was different now, kind of, but only by so much.

Then Eddie said,“Oh god,” and tilted his head to the side to give Richie better access to the juncture between his neck and shoulder. His hairline was dark and neat, and the curve of his skill was smooth and pale, and his ear was flushed pink, and Richie wanted to tug on the lobe with his teeth, then suck on it. Move his hands from Eddie’s shoulders to his chest. Stop worrying about getting a boner.

Richie had to close his eyes. He finished up the massage without any real finesse. “That’s all she wrote,” he said insanely, and took a big step away.

Eddie reached his elbows back, his spine arching, and then he turned to Richie. He was still flushed. “Thanks,” he said.

“Any time.” Richie tried not to look at Eddie for too long. “I got your shirt all wrinkly,” he said.

Eddie tucked his chin in and made an adorable sturgeon face trying to inspect the damage. “It’ll be fine,” he said. “Assuming you didn’t have motor oil on your hands.”

“You think I’ve ever had motor oil on my hands?” Richie said. This was intended as an opening for a car-based jab, but Eddie was still so out of it, he just made a strained small smile and shrugged. Richie went over to the fridge and got beers just so he’d have a break from looking and being looked at. “Hey,” he said, still looking into the fridge, “you want to get takeout?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “Sure, Richie. Thanks.”

Richie was in the middle of swallowing a too-big mouthful of pad thai when Eddie said, “I think I left my wife.” At that point, Richie aspirated a noodle. He thought he was going to have to be Heimliched for a good half-second, and Eddie, dropping his fork with a clatter, seemed to think so too. “Shit, Richie, are you okay?”

“Yep, I’m fine,” Richie said, finally getting it under control. “Dude, are  _ you _ ? I attacked you when you came in instead of, like, of asking how you were.”

“You did ask how I was,” Eddie said. “I just didn’t want to—I don’t know.” Instead of picking his fork back up, he propped his elbows on the island and tugged at his hair. “Fuck. I really don’t know. I left my wife over the phone.”

“That’s so much better than not leaving her at all, dude,” Richie said.

Eddie looked at his plate, eyebrows knitted together. “I don’t know if that’s true,” he said.

“It is,” Richie said. “You, like—Eds, I’m sorry, but you did  _ not _ seem like you wanted to be married. Which would be enough alone, but, also, nobody actually wants to be married to someone who doesn’t want to be married to them. You did the right thing. A lot of people aren’t brave enough to do that.”

Eddie glanced up at Richie and smiled softly, briefly. “Thanks, Rich,” he said.

Richie stared at him stupidly for a second, then shook his head a little to clear it. “What do you want to do?” he asked. “Listen, this weekend can be, uh. The bachelor equivalent of revirgination.”

“Ugh,” Eddie said. “Jesus.”

“I think Jesus is sticking with the actual revirginations,” Richie said. “We’ll get someone else involved in this one. Not Satan, but maybe, like, one of the sluttier angels.”

“Great, Richie, thank you,” Eddie said. “I don’t actually want to go back to being a bachelor, though. The way I was, at least. I kind of want to—” He made a few sharp choppy gestures.

“Uh, you want to…”

“I think I’m gay,” Eddie said. “I mean. Well. All evidence suggests I’m gay.”

_ You don’t have any proof, _ Eddie’d said in the hammock. Richie wanted, for one almost-cruel moment, to mention this, because he was utterly freaking out and needed to offload the panic somewhere. But Eddie was freaking out worse—Eddie was freaking out for a real reason—so Richie instead said, ridiculously, “welcome to the club!”

“Uh. Yeah. Not that I—” Eddie said, and turned bright red. Richie wasn’t sure what he was about to say, but he could guess. Something about refusing to join any club that would have Richie as a member. “I don’t know,” Eddie continued. “I don’t really know what to do.”

“We can do whatever you want,” Richie said. “Anything that’d make you feel better. Seriously, anything. Or worse, actually, if that’s how you want to play it.”

Eddie smiled a little and laughed through his nose. “Okay,” he said. “Can I make you buy a better couch? Just to start off.”

“Hell yeah,” Richie said. “If it makes you feel better, you can remodel my whole apartment.”

“I think you’d lose your security deposit.”

“Who gives a shit? I’m rich and famous.”

Eddie made a face of great furrowed befuddlement for a second, then hit his head with the heel of his hand. “God, you’re right,” Eddie said. “You  _ are  _ rich and famous! Sorry, I totally spaced.” He was doing the bit through several densely-packed layers of palpable distress, but the fact that he was doing it anyway made Richie’s chest feel like a glowing salt lamp.

**Eddie**

“You could get a daybed, a futon, a foldout couch,” Eddie said. “You could even get a real bed, if you wanted to get rid of the desk.”

Richie was not paying attention. “Eddie,” he said. “look at this,” and presented Eddie with a silicon wall hook shaped like a cat’s ass.

“Do you have a sixth sense for novelty items?” Eddie said.

“I just have a sixth sense for items you’re not gonna like, man,” Richie said. “Remember that time at the bookstore?”

In October of their senior year, Eddie’d driven them to Brunswick under the flimsy pretense that he was visiting Bowdoin, but they’d ended up just wandering around for hours, never setting foot on campus. They’d gotten pizza, way better than the pizza in Derry, and then, when the sun was setting, had gone into a store with a book called  _ The Joy of Gay Sex _ in the window display. The guy working the register had floppy hair and one pierced ear, and he’d pretended not to see them as Richie paged through an anthology of erotic photographs and muttered, “this guy looks like you,” to Eddie at intervals. He’d also pretended not to notice when Richie shoved the anthology down the front of his horrible canary yellow flannel, even though Eddie had been hissing—in retrospect, counterproductively—“RICHIE PUT THAT BACK PUT THAT BACK DUDE STOP I’M SO FUCKING SERIOUS RICHIE” the whole time. Eddie had been so mad, then, and he’d also been so consciously in love, which was scarier even than the hot inchoate way he felt about Richie the rest of the time. He’d been quiet on the way home, and then he hadn’t slept over at Richie’s, even though he’d already given his mom some elaborate excuse for doing so. He’d just gone home and thought about the cashier’s benevolent disregard and the fact that somebody had written an entire book about how to have gay sex.

Before Eddie could in any way indicate to Richie that this was different from the bookstore, actually, because he wasn’t in a panic of irritated arousal now (he was aroused, sure, but he wasn’t particularly panicked or irritated), Richie started backing up, wiggling the cat’s ass between him and Eddie like some kind of talisman. IKEA was pretty packed—it was late morning on a Saturday—and Richie walked right into someone’s cart. “Sorry,” he said without looking behind him, and start walking forward again. “I’m trying to redeploy the sixth sense to psychically manipulate you into getting lunch with me now.”

“It’s not really manipulation if you just say it,” Eddie said, which was true, and part of what made Richie himself. He wasn’t manipulative enough even to manipulate Eddie, who was incredibly easy to manipulate. When he wasn’t performing, when he was just being him, he tended to say what he wanted, and Eddie got to say yes or no, knowing that he had whatever information he needed to make the call. “I’d get lunch.”

“Yes!” Richie exclaimed, and turned around to put the hook back in the bin where he’d found it. 

Eddie got vegetable medallions, and Richie got meatballs. Richie also got princess cake, but decided quickly that he didn’t like it. Weirdly, Eddie loved it and ate the rest, slowly so he wouldn’t hurt his teeth. He hadn’t eaten an artificially-colored dessert in something like a decade. Except for the Pop-Tart, if that counted.

When he’d finished and Eddie was still working on the cake, Richie grabbed a catalog. He pushed up his glasses and held it really close to his face. “Hey, Eds,” he said, then made his voice guttural and round. “SNEFJORD. That’s the name of my, uh—my wife who makes all the battle garb? SNEFJORD.”

“Give me that,” Eddie said, and snatched the catalog. He found SNEFJORD on the page. “SNEFJORD,” he said, in honestly a much better accent than Richie.

Richie drummed on the table delightedly. “Look who was right about the Viking shit!” Instead of grabbing the catalog, he just leaned forward and read upside down, face close to Eddie’s. “BJÖRKSNÄS. That’s our kid’s name. Our kid, who’s a terrible soldier. We’re going to leave him in the woods.”

“That was awful,” Eddie said. “Are you even trying?”

“BJÖRKSNÄS,” he said again, lower. He actually was getting better. How did anyone’s brain work that fast? Eddie never really forgot how smart Richie was, but even when they were kids, he’d sometimes get hit by it all at once. He was a really extraordinary person.

“Not bad,” Eddie said. “Okay, let’s find you some furniture.” He stacked their dishes on a tray, and Richie went to bus them.

Eddie had wanted so badly to kiss Richie last night. Richie probably wasn’t interested anymore, but—he’d given Eddie that massage, hadn’t he? He’d cleaned his microwave, and then he’d given Eddie a massage. He definitely had better options, but Eddie was the one who called him every day, and Richie hadn’t stopped picking up yet. Eddie didn’t have a lot to offer, but he could keep calling, if Richie wanted him to, indefinitely.

But the prospect of kissing Richie was like the prospect of leaving Myra: these were things everyone else knew how to do instinctively, small everyday courages that came naturally to the whole world outside of Eddie, while Eddie spent his entire life paralyzed, feeling alternately flayed alive and like he was behind a one-way mirror looking in at what everyone else did. There was as good as no connection between what Eddie thought and what he did, what he made happen. He couldn’t get close enough to touch, much less to touch what he wanted.

Richie loped back to their table, arms swinging, smirking like he’d seen something weird, and Eddie managed to get his brain under control enough to ask what was so funny.

They walked together through the bedroom displays until they’d come to a folded-out convertible bed in a garishly coral-red room. “Hey,” Eddie said, “that could work.” He sat down. “Mattress isn’t bad.”

Richie sat down beside him. “Okay, to be totally honest, I have no idea how to evaluate whether a mattress is bad or not-bad.”

“It’s, like—” Eddie made himself bounce slightly a few times. “The amount of give. Whether it conforms to your ass.”

Instead of doing the same, Richie just leaned back on his hands and smiled at Eddie. He was wearing a bright green shirt that said, mysteriously, “Sayles Family Christmas,” with a wreath around the text. It stretched across the breadth of his shoulders, worn and, it looked like, soft. He desperately needed a haircut.

_ He is so handsome _ , Eddie thought, like he did very occasionally when they were kids. It was still a mortifying thought to have. But then their eyes really locked, and Eddie felt a weird chemical rush in some part of his head he couldn’t place, like everything was narrowing and getting brighter. He didn’t feel braver, exactly, but the whited-out frenzy  _ he is so handsome and brilliant and kind and he knows me enough to take me here with him  _ almost drowned out his cowardice through sheer volume. He felt like he was getting some kind of courage-transfusion from Richie, just from looking at him, and he felt on the verge of doing something very, very potentially stupid when Richie abruptly flopped onto his back and said, loudly, “You think Seth Meyers’ll come over if I get this bed?”

Eddie blinked. “What,” he said.

“You know Seth Meyers?” Richie asked. “Dude, you definitely know Seth Meyers. He’s on  _ Late Night _ . He used to be on  _ Weekend Update _ ?” When Eddie didn’t say anything, he went on, “I’ve met him at like ten parties and I think I’m gonna pass out every time. Just from sex appeal. Because I sort of like my men to walk like a dressage horse, and for their foreheads to crumple up like a really uptight kleenex when they’re talking, and all that shit. So. I have a huge crush on Seth Meyers.”

“Are you serious?” Eddie said. He sounded a little crazy, even to his own ears.

“Uh, I’m serious about the crush, but obviously not anything else,” Richie said, “Like, there’s no way he’s gonna sleep on this bed. I’m not gonna become a guy who has boyfriends just from getting a new couch. Also, Seth’s totally straight. _ Also _ , why would he be sleeping on the guest bed if we were fucking?”

“Yeah, that’s my fucking question,” Eddie said, and he stood up abruptly. “Okay, do you want this one or not?”

“Woah,” Richie said. “I thought you were the big furniture guy here. I don’t know how to make all these decisions.” The angle he was looking at Eddie from—Eddie standing over him, Richie staring up at him with his chin tilted up—was really bad news for Eddie, sexually and emotionally, as was the content of what Richie was saying. But Richie either didn’t know or didn’t care. That was always the question with Richie, whether he knew or cared. He certainly wasn’t doing both.

“It’s your apartment,” Eddie said.

“Yeah, man, I know, but I don’t know how to have an apartment, as you’re well aware. That’s why I’m asking.”

“I don’t know how to have an apartment either,” Eddie snapped. “I’ve never lived alone.”

Richie held his hands up. “Well, you’re gonna, dude, soon. Picking this out is a trial run. Or, like, a reminder that no matter how unequipped you feel to live alone, I’m  _ way  _ less equipped, and I’ve done it for thirteen years without dying. How’s that?”

Of course he was going to live alone; of course that wasn’t a question Richie was even asking. What Richie was offering was really nice, actually, and it was so unconscionably fucked up that all of Eddie’s internal organs went cold when Richie said it, but they went cold anyway.

“Fine. Get this one,” Eddie said. “It’s a fine bed.”

Eddie stayed actively miserable until they got down to the warehouse level, at which point he started finding ways to poke Richie with the corners of the box of bedframe parts and pretending he wasn’t doing it. Richie caught on quick, as always, and started doing dramatic impalement sound effects every time an edge of the box grazed him. In the car back, Richie let Eddie drive, played  _ WHAT YOU MISSED (PSYCHEDELICS) _ , and made Eddie promise not to try to put the bed together as soon as they got back to the apartment.

Instead, when they got back, Richie set down the bedframe, wiped the back of his hand across his forehead, and turned to Eddie. “Well,” he said, “we did interior decorating. It’s time for the next step of becoming gay.”

Eddie experienced the neurological equivalent of a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it power outage. “The next step of…”

“Yeah, baby,” Richie said, and whipped his phone out of his pocket. “Grindr.”

Richie’d already made himself pretty clear, but there was apparently no upper limit to the number of shitty, shitty feelings Eddie was capable of having. It was one thing to not even be an option when held to the standard of Seth Meyers, who was not only a celebrity but also, according to Google, two inches taller than Eddie. It was another to not even be an option when held to the standard of strangers from the internet.

Richie was already sinking into the couch, kicking his socked feet onto the coffee table. On autopilot, Eddie sat down next to him. “Okay,” Richie said. “So obviously this whole thing is pretty much torture, but it is a way preferable torture to never getting laid. I’m gonna give you the step-by-step breakdown, man. Like Julia Child.” He tapped around on his phone for awhile. “Here’s my profile,” he said, and passed the phone to Eddie.

In Richie’s picture, he was wearing a button-up with what appeared to be tiny ostriches on it, smiling with a tall can at some kind of outdoor party. There was a pink sunset reflecting in his glasses. It was a really good photo, actually. His name was set to “$Rich$”, and his bio read,  _ no face pic necessary im blind anyway _ .

“Don’t judge me for the bio,” Richie said. “It’s been that since 2011. Not the name, obviously. I used to not have a face pic, for obvious reasons, so it was like, a way to convey general sluttiness and apologize in advance at the same time. Now it’s just the general sluttiness.” He pulled up a list with his height and weight and build. “Okay, so there’s this thing called tribes, which is, like—not your type, but what type you are,” Richie said. “See, I put bear. I mean, like, I’m not really a bear, but guys who go for bears will usually go for me too if there’s no better option. Which is the point of the tribes thing. You’re, uh—” Richie closed one eye and squinted at Eddie. “Probably an otter.”

The idea of being of a type at all made Eddie sort of nauseous; the idea of being of a type named after a mustelid was even worse. Eddie hated thinking about the limits of his niche, like he was some sort of collector’s item. He also, more acutely and uncomfortably, hated the way that Richie was treating him—like he  _ needed _ sex, like getting laid was like eating or drinking, a biological necessity completely out of Eddie’s control, and he had to rely on other people’s willingness to be caretakers to get it. If it was such a biological necessity, Eddie would have withered and died a long time ago from how much he wanted Richie. Sometimes, he felt like he’d die without love, but, he knew from experience, he would not. He was a cockroach in the nuclear apocalypse; he could survive without Richie’s help. He’d survived without Richie’s help for two decades.

“You’re cute, so you could get away with saying ‘hi’,” Richie said. “Actually, you could probably get away with saying pretty much anything. I’d do ‘hey’ if you want to fuck the guy and ‘hi’ if you want him to fuck you, but I’m not the boss of you.” When Eddie didn’t say anything, he said, “You can look, if you want examples,” and offered his phone to Eddie.

He was too dazed to refuse, and he scrolled through the chat, landing on the one Richie had replied in most recently. It had been on Tuesday, which made Eddie’s head buzz horribly. Tuesday was after he knew Eddie was coming, after he knew Eddie was interviewing for the LA job. Eddie was a fucking idiot, pretty much.

He opened the chat. Richie’s response had been a photo of his dick.

“Shit, sorry,” Richie said, snatching the phone out of Eddie’s hand and backing out of the chat, but there was still sufficient time for the image of Richie’s penis in his hand to impress itself indelibly onto Eddie’s memory.

It was really, really sufficient, too. Richie’s dick, that was.

“Well, that won’t happen to you again,” Richie was saying, apparently unaware of all that was happening with Eddie’s face and body. “I mean, you’ll totally get bombarded with dick pics, but not specifically my dick pics. This is the last time you’ll have to deal with that particular problem on Grindr.”

“Great,” Eddie said, his soul several miles away from his corporeal form.

“Hold on,” Richie said. “I’m finding a conversation where you’re not gonna have to look at my schlong.” He held the phone close to my face. “Here’s—nope, my asshole’s in that one,” he said, and kept tapping away at the screen. Eddie felt very unwell. “Okay. Finally,” Richie said, and passed the phone to Eddie.

**$Rich$:** _hey whats up_

**PNW Forever:** _ hey _

**$Rich$:** _ heyy _

**PNW Forever:** _heyyyyyyy_

**$Rich$:** _ ooh extra y’s u after something? ;) _

**PNW Forever:** _amazingly, yes_

**$Rich$:** _ dude im a famous comedian chill out w the negging _

**PNW Forever:** _are u john mulaney?_

 **$Rich$:** _LOL no_

 **$Rich$:** _im richie tozier_

**$Rich$:** _ it wld be in character for john mulaney to be on grindr under my name/face but i actually am for real richie tozier _

**PNW Forever:** _ oh cool _

“Don’t scroll any farther,” Richie said. “That’s when the dicks start. But, look.” He tapped on the profile. “Not bad, right?” He waggled his eyebrows.

The guy was a narrow, delicate-featured brunet in a rock-climbing harness. He had a kind of weird chin. “He isn’t even good-looking,” Eddie said. “You could do better.” He was still a little shocked that Richie was willing to send strangers photos of his dick, under his own name, but he supposed that, given Richie’s career thus far, it wouldn’t be exactly out of line with what was expected of him, if they ever came to light publicly.

Richie laughed. “I could do better? Me? Dude, look at this guy.” He tapped around until he found a mediocre torso shot. Eddie gave Richie a skeptical look—and then he kept looking, because Richie was leaning back, legs spread and head tilted.

Richie seemed to think everyone who slept with him did so out of some combined pity-aggression instinct, but he walked around like this every day. It wasn’t fucking fair. Eddie wanted to tear Richie’s clothes off and then just stare, to be the one who got to look at him. But he couldn’t, because he wasn’t. That was a privilege reserved for this guy with the world’s most obnoxious hobby and surprisingly little shoulder definition.

“I don’t think I can do this,” Eddie blurted out.

Richie gave him a quizzical look. “Eds,” he said, “you are very, very hot. By anyone’s standards, but, like, gay standards especially. You check literally every box.”

“I don’t mean,” Eddie started, and pressed his fingers to his temples. “It’s not about that. I just don’t think I can do the app thing. I don’t know if I can even do the dating thing, honestly.”

“Yes, you can,” Richie said. He sounded so unlike himself that Eddie almost thought he was doing a Voice. It wasn’t a funny Voice, or even a mean one, but there was definitely something wrong with it. “Again, you’re dateable by anyone’s standards, but by gay standards, you’re, like, off the charts. You’re a hilarious genius, and you’re also a good guy, and you are rolling in money. You’re not gonna have any problems.”

“It’s not about what I am,” Eddie said. “Or—it is. I just. I can’t talk to people I haven’t known for thirty years. I mean, I can talk to them. But it’s not—I can’t tell them anything. I just can’t. I never have.”

“You don’t have to,” Richie said.

“I kind of do, actually,” Eddie said. “I haven’t had sex with a guy in twenty years, so, yeah, there’s a few things I’d have to clear first.” He crossed his arms. “I’m not crazy for not wanting to fuck a stranger.”

“I didn’t say you were crazy,” Richie said. “But, like, think about it. Everyone you know does Excel all day. Is Excel hot to you? Do you want to fuck any of those guys?”

“No! God,” Eddie said. “Obviously not.”

“That kind of leaves strangers, dude,” Richie said.

Eddie could tell he was blushing from how suddenly cold his hands were. He hated being old and poorly-circulated, and he hated being obvious, and he hated the face Richie was making now, unfamiliar but very much like the face he made when he was figuring out the wrong-right thing to say to someone.

Richie put the phone down and leaned against the armrest, facing Eddie. “Listen,” he said. “If all else fails, I’m totally down to be a gay sex sacrificial lamb.”

“A sacrificial lamb,” Eddie repeated.

“Yeah, like—” Richie held his wrists together and tilted his head back like “Agnus Dei.” “It happened before, it can happen again.”

_ It happened before _ . Eddie was starting to hyperventilate. “In Derry,” he asked, but his voice was so flat it sounded like a statement.

“You got it,” Richie said, and winked. “Well, not just Derry. Or with you. I’m good at sacrifice generally. I’m a very giving lover.”

So that’s what it had been, then. Richie had generously laid himself on the altar of Eddie’s pathetic sexual awakening, and now he would do it again, just out of the goodness of his heart. It didn’t have anything to do with Eddie; none of it did. It was all very general.

“You want me to be grateful for that?” Eddie spat. “Thank you, Richie, really, for the great sacrifice you made for me, in small-town Maine, surrounded by other options. I’m fucking honored. Your dick is irreplaceable.” 

“I am fully fucking aware that my dick is replacable. I literally just had a conversation with you about how, exactly, to replace my dick, and you said _no, Richard, I can only speak to people who I’ve known for 30 years._ ” Richie said the last part in a painfully accurate, exaggeratedly (Eddie thought—he didn’t know, at this point) gay imitation of him. “My self-worth is not totally bound up in being your rebound. I could be lots of people’s rebounds.”

“Oh, poor, poor Richie. You can’t do better than that?” Eddie felt his voice starting to go desperate. He tried to take a deep breath, not knowing if he was talking about Richie doing better than being a rebound, or doing better than Eddie, or both. 

“That’s the thing, man. I actually can’t,” Richie said. He hesitated for a second, and then: “I don’t know if you can, either, considering. At least for practice. If you’re gonna turn down every guy you see on Grindr because he doesn’t meet your gym rat standards.” This accompanied by a dead-eyed blowjob gesture that struck Eddie as incredibly vicious.

“God, Richie,” he said, his field of vision going a little wobbly with anger. “You’ll fuck anything, but you can’t date anyone? That’s  _ really  _ depressing.”

Richie looked caught off-guard, for whatever reason. He was fucking with Eddie. What did he think was going to happen? “I dated the dentist,” he said.

“Yeah, so you could make jokes about drilling.”

“He wasn’t—”

“No, Richie, maybe he actually  _ was _ . Maybe it bothered him a little that you wouldn’t take anything about him seriously.”

“Calm the fuck down,” Richie said. “I liked him. He dumped me.”

“He probably didn’t realize that, if you made jokes about drilling the whole time.”

“Yeah, like you didn’t laugh at those jokes,” Richie said, and Eddie was genuinely unsure, for a second, which jokes he was talking about, the ones he’d made about the dentist or the ones he’d made about Eddie, over the years. The huge joke he’d made of Eddie. Eddie had forgotten, last time he was in LA, how little weight he really carried here, how unimportant he was; he’d forgotten because he’d been taking care of Richie, and the delusion of necessariness was so comforting that nothing else mattered. Eddie could only be helpless or helpful, and Richie didn’t want him either way, really. Richie just wanted him to watch. 

“Fuck you,” Eddie said, half to himself. “ _ Fuck _ you. I’m trying to put something on the line here and you don’t give a shit.”

Richie snorted. “Oh, yeah, telling me you’re gay? God, Eds, I had no idea. Thanks for trusting me with this delicate information. I thought you were just on a pussy elimination diet.” Eddie hesitated just a beat too long, and a slow, toothy grin spread across Richie’s face horizontally, not reaching his eyes. “You’ve never eaten pussy,” he said. “ _ Wow _ , Eds.”

“Don’t fucking call me that,” Eddie said, for the first time since Derry.

Richie laughed. “Sure. Wow,  _ Edward _ , you’ve never eaten pussy. Is that why you were with Myra? Because you were looking for someone so below your league you’d never have to lick a clit? You got different standards for guys?”

Eddie stood up. “I can’t talk to you anymore,” he said.

“Yeah, well, I don’t have you chained up in here,” Richie said. “You can leave.”

Eddie thought about Richie’s handcuffs and wanted to punch through the drywall. “There’s something really fucking wrong with the way you treat people,” he said, stomping into the guest bedroom to get his suitcase. He threw everything in unfolded, including his suit.

“I know, man,” Richie said, as Eddie walked back into the living room. “Have fun convincing your wife to stick her finger up your ass, by the way.”

“Have fun dying alone!” Eddie yelled, and slammed the front door.

**Richie**

Richie held himself still. That’s what he did when he became aware, onstage, of some kind of impending attack, terror or despair or whatever. The only way to conceal it was to stay totally still. Usually this just made it look like he was being intentionally hostile to his audience, which was fine. Now he could see himself through Eddie’s eyes, and he knew he looked like a stupid mannequin, frozen in place, not even enough of a human being to move.

He couldn’t call any of the Losers, not even Stan or Bev, because none of them could know about Eddie. Richie was a complete piece of shit, but he wasn’t that divorced from any sense of what was right. You didn’t tell people that their friend was being driven by the abstract idea of dick to move across the country; you didn’t tell them that he’d rejected you. And he couldn’t call Steve, who was only Richie’s friend because he paid him to be, and because he felt bad that some gay people still lived the way Richie did, against all odds. Richie didn’t have any other friends. Now he didn’t have Eddie.

He started to cry. At least nobody could see him. 

He’d made Eddie a fourth playlist, but he never sent it—apparently, he was less of a complete fucking idiot a month ago than he was now. He’d saved it under a long string of random letters. It was all the songs Richie remembered as theirs, which was a really horrifyingly long list. A lot of these songs Richie had made a big deal out of not liking, because that was about the only plausible deniability he had ever had, about anything, in his life. He professed to only like ’80s R.E.M., for example, because otherwise he wouldn’t be able to fast-forward over “Nightswimming” with an eye-roll whenever it came on.

Now he played it loud, so that he could wrack himself with shaking sobs, just to get out all the poison. Like drinking with food poisoning—do something worse to himself to make it all come back up, make it all better or at least over with. That had never worked, for Richie, just made him puke more, but he kept doing it anyway. Every time. He poured himself a full coffee mug of disgustingly expensive, disgusting gin, and sat down on the floor, cross-legged, hunched over himself and holding his convulsing stomach, heaving through his teeth. 

He made a horrible wet noise, and clapped a hand over his mouth, before he remembered that nobody could hear him. The hand came away with slobber on it, but it was okay, because he was alone. He would have a good private cry, and drink too much, and fall asleep on the floor, and it would be—well, not okay, but it would be not-okay in private. One of the perks of dying alone, he supposed, and suppressed the urge to tear his face off like a scooby-doo villain. 

And then his phone rang. It was Eddie. Richie didn’t pick up, but he kept looking at it until the red glowing phone icon disappeared, which gave him significantly less relief than he had thought it would. 

He got a text. From Eddie. It read:  _ I left my toiletry bag. _

Another one:  _ I’m outside fucking let me in _

_ I will call the super _

Richie touched his wet, burning face, and thought,  _ I am so fucked _ . Then he heard a knock at the door.

If he didn’t open the door, Eddie would leave him on nothing, with nothing, not even yelling at him one last time. It would be smart to go that route, to just mail Eddie his fucking toiletry bag, but Richie was weak, so he stood and opened the door, sort of hiding behind it.

Eddie’s hair had come completely ungelled and was sticking up at a crazy angle. He looked like Sonic the Hedgehog. He was also bright red and crossing his arms tight against his chest like he thought someone might try to grab him. When Richie opened the door, Eddie’s face had been set in a rigor-mortis squint of rage, but it only stayed that way for the half-second it took him to register the state of Richie’s eyes and nose and mouth and, frankly, entire body.

“Oh my god,” he said, his whole expression falling off, his face melting like wax.

Richie stepped back from the door. “Ta-fucking-da,” he tried to say, gesturing at his whole self, but the “da” was interrupted with a wrenched-out sob that sounded like a screaming hiccup. Then he tried to go into his bedroom, but Eddie wouldn’t let him, bullying himself into Richie’s space and looking right into his eyes, holding his gaze and not letting go. Richie should have known just how weak he was, after all this time, but it still surprised him that he couldn’t look away. He did, finally, after way too long. After Eddie had most likely seen everything through the swollen windows to where his soul should be, and knew. Eddie always knew, probably. He’d always known that Richie was damply, cruelly, pathetically in love with him, and this was Eddie’s last indulgence of his stupid shenanigans. 

“Just go home, dude,” Richie said. “Seriously, get the fuck out of here.”

“Why are you listening to ‘Nightswimming’?” Eddie asked quietly.

Richie somehow managed to feel a horrible swoop in his gut, still, even after the disaster of the day. The jig was really fucking up, and it was because he didn’t pause his stupid Spotify. “Eds,” he said, voice breaking.

“I know you don’t like this album,” Eddie said. “Richie, what’s going on?”

“No,” Richie said. “Seriously. I’m not brave like you, okay? I was brave, and a guy died. I can’t do that to you. I’m not going to make you deal with that shit. So please, please, let me be a fucking coward about this, and get out. I’m sorry.”

“About what?”

“My dumb gay feelings, obviously.” Richie did small sarcastic jazz hands after he said “feelings,” just to hammer in the point that whatever he had was contagious and Eddie should get out while he could.

Something happened to Eddie’s face, then. It got harder and softer at once, his eyes melting and his chin going square and proud, and then he leaned forward and kissed Richie.

Richie’s face was wet, but Eddie didn’t pull away, just cupped Richie’s jaw in his hands and kissed him more. Eddie was gentle but firm, sweeping his thumbs across Richie’s stubble. Richie couldn’t stop himself, couldn’t make himself stop, so he wrapped his arms around Eddie, getting tangled up in his own limbs trying to hold him tighter. Eddie smiled against his mouth and rearranged Richie’s arms, and Richie felt himself collapsing inward, falling to rubble around Eddie.

Rubble was right: Richie was a fucking ruin. Eddie kissed him again, hard, licking into Richie’s mouth and tangling a hand in his hair, and they were so close. He felt Eddie’s hard hot body against his, the square callus on his thumb, and god,  _ god, _ he was so in love.

_ I can do this _ , Richie thought.  _ I’ve done it before and I can do it again.  _ He would take whatever Eddie gave him, because he couldn’t imagine there being anything better than this. Better than molly, better than coke, better than any audience or any brief delusional sense of being liked. Eddie’s affection was clean and sharp and beautiful, because Eddie was clean and sharp and beautiful. He said things no one else would say, and he kissed Richie like no one else had kissed him. If this was all Richie would ever have, that was okay. It was enough. 

But then, between kisses, Richie got a glimpse of Eddie’s face, and he remembered, suddenly, the fall after they’d graduated high school, the way he’d felt on the drive to LA with his mother, which his parents had agreed to after it became clear that Richie was going to drive himself there, drunk all the way, if they didn’t take matters into their own hands. He kept having to puke out the window, and Maggie hadn’t said a word to him the whole time. She hadn’t known in high school, about him and Eddie, but she figured it out pretty quick then. 

The clean sharp beautiful affection had been everything to Richie when he had it, and then he’d had nothing at all. He’d spent over a year contorting himself to better catch scraps, and then it was over, and none of his contortions mattered anymore. He didn’t really have anything left, when that happened. He didn’t know how to live off anything else.

Eddie thought Richie was like a car or a gun, which you could fix if you broke them, and which you could always pick back up if you put them down. Richie had thought he was like that, too; it was what he’d tried to tell Eddie, and he’d meant it. But he wasn’t a particularly good tool, when it came down to it, not even a funny one, like a dick-shaped shot glass at a bachelorette party or a fake pack of gum that shocked you. He had the terribly compelling proof of a victim to remind him that he didn’t get any special exemption from cause and effect. When he killed someone, they stayed dead. When he loved someone, he stayed in love. Horribly enough, he was a fucking person.

Another sob shook Richie’s shoulders, and he pulled away. Eddie tried to follow, and Richie took a tiny shuffling step back. He wasn’t strong enough for a real step.“I can’t,” he said. “I thought I could, but I just can’t. I’m—shit. I’m in love with you.” Maybe Eddie made a face, or tried to say something; Richie couldn’t take finding out right now, so he pushed his fingers up under his glasses, blocking Eddie out. “So, um,” he continued, “please don’t hate me, but also stop kissing me.”

Eddie didn’t step back, and Richie was about to do it himself, when Eddie grabbed Richie’s wrist, pulling his hand off his face. He looked him in the eye. “Richie,” he said, “I love you too.”

Eddie leaned in to kiss him again, but Richie was stumbling backwards, one hand up. His knees buckled, or maybe he tripped, or maybe he just got too fucking tired, and he sat down, hard, on the floor of the entryway.

“Richie?”

“Give me a second,” Richie said, and put his head in his hands.

Eddie stood over him, wide eyed. “Richie, are you—”

“Just hold on,” Richie said. He breathed for a few seconds. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. You—”

“I love you,” Eddie said again, like Richie had maybe forgotten.

“Yeah, I can hear you,” Richie said, with such a total absence of bitchiness that he scared himself. “You—huh.”

“Richie,” Eddie said again. 

“How can you fucking mean that,” Richie said.

Eddie kneeled beside him. “Look at me,” he said. Richie met Eddie’s wide-eyed burning gaze, and he felt vertiginously like Eddie was looking right into his skull, like Eddie’d scrubbed everything else off, skin and stubble and all. “I love you,” he said again, and then he gave a small, soft smile, like whatever he’d seen of Richie’s insides had been fine with him.

Eddie sat down then, and Richie couldn’t help it: he wrapped himself around Eddie completely, his face at Eddie’s temple and his arms around his waist. 

“Being in love with me is such a bad idea,” Richie said.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Eddie replied. He kissed Richie just above his t-shirt collar, then inhaled against Richie’s skin. Richie had to make fists in the back of Eddie’s shirt to keep from bursting into a fresh wave of tears.

They sat like that for awhile. “I shouldn’t have said what I did,” Eddie said eventually, very quiet. “I didn’t mean it.”

“No, it’s true.” Richie almost wiped his face on Eddie’s hair, then had a moment of terror that doing so would cause Eddie to shove Richie away and run for the hills. He raised his upper arm to scrub at his eyes instead. “I don’t want people getting in there, you know? Like, into my soul. It sucks. If the devil offered me OxyContin for it, I’d be down. I really hate that thing.”

“I love your soul,” Eddie said.

“It’s not animating  _ your _ shitty sock puppet of a body,” Richie said. “Your body isn’t even a shitty sock puppet.”

“I can process data, idiot. I know who your puppeteer is.” He wiped under Richie’s eyes with his knuckles.

Richie squeezed his eyes shut. “I can’t believe you even came back here,” he said quietly. “After all the shit I said. Fuck.”

“Well, you hurt my feelings. I felt like you didn’t give a shit about me. But I know you do.”

“How the hell could you think that?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Eddie said, “maybe because you said,  _ I’m good at sacrifice generally _ ?”

Richie couldn’t tell if he was laughing or crying, but some explosion of air left his body in tears and snot. “Fuck. I can’t believe that was, like, something I said. And I said it fifteen minutes ago. Also, I’m not even good at sacrifice. That’s just a total lie.”

“That’s not true, either,” Eddie said. “You sacrificed when we were killing the clown. You sacrifice to protect people. But I don’t want you to do that for me.”

“I’m not,” Richie said. “Sitting on the floor weeping while you tenderly minister to me is seriously no skin off my back.”

Eddie laughed and leaned his forehead on Richie’s shoulder. “What the fuck,” he said quietly. “Tenderly minister?” Which Richie could deal with, but then he said, “God, I do love you,” which Richie could not. He tried to hold in another sob, but it just came out through his nose, burning. Eddie turned to press little kisses along the top of his shoulder. 

“I love you too,” and then the dam broke. “I love you so, so much, Eds, just—so much. All the time.” And Eddie grinned and wrapped his arms around him, because, apparently, it was okay that the dam broke. Fuck it, Richie didn’t even need a dam. Maybe. “So, do you want to be, like—” He almost said “boyfriends,” but that sounded stupid for so many reasons and also kind of awful to assume. 

“I want to be with you,” Eddie said, voice steady like he was trying really hard to keep it that way. Richie made an incredibly stupid whimper of a sound, and Eddie rubbed his back slowly. “If you want.” 

Richie nodded so hard he almost dislodged Eddie’s head from his neck. “Sorry,” he said, and flopped onto Eddie’s knee like a seal. “But yeah, I want.” 

“Great,” Eddie said, kind of dopily, brushing Richie’s hair away from his face and smiling down at him.

“And. Like.” Richie didn’t have the wherewithal for any hand motions, but he made a face that conveyed his point, which wasn’t difficult, since his eyes had gone heavy-lidded of their own accord. Probably this wasn’t the best way to approach the issue, but the way Eddie was looking at him was starting to make him feel like he wasn’t just the good version of concussed, but maybe instead the good version of permanently brain-damaged. Like he had the good version of mad cow disease.

Eddie stared at him. “Are you asking if I want to fuck you?”

“Yeah.”

“Obviously yes,” Eddie said. “I mean, not right now. You’re already crying, and—”

“What does ‘already’ mean?” Richie said. “You gonna make me cry, Eds?”

“Truly, what is your problem,” Eddie said, but he was blushing violently and clearing his throat. “I haven’t eaten since noon, my blood sugar is so low. Also, I have to change my flight. So.”

“What if I make dinner, and you change your flight, and  _ then  _ we fuck.”

Eddie was grinning so big and so soft that his laugh just came out through his nose. “Yeah, okay. Sounds like a plan.”

“Great! Scheduled sex. Eds, you have finally gotten me to act my age, which is genuinely incredible. You deserve a medal.”

Eddie snorted. “Asshole,” he said, and stood up, then reached out a hand to pull Richie creakily to his feet. 

Richie was halfway through making a vegetable stir fry before he realized how deeply unsexy a food vegetable stir fry was. In high school he’d had a kind of waifish young Michael Stipe metrosexual thing going on, which Eddie had been into at the time, and which kind of went with stir fry, but Richie definitely couldn’t pull that off anymore. He didn’t really know what thing he had going on anymore—well, he did, actually, he had a very precise idea of what he had going on, but the whole point of what he had going on now was that it was a type absolutely no one wanted to lock down. What did that guy make for the most amazing person in the world, who was now, apparently, his boyfriend? Burgers?

“This is vegetable stir fry,” Richie said, pointing at it. “Do you, like, need more protein than is in vegetable stir fry?”

Eddie looked at him, fondly mystified, the corners of his mouth turning up.“What?”

Richie gestured at Eddie’s entire bodily situation and said, insanely, “For your, um. You seem like you work out a lot?” Which startled a loud snorting laugh from eddie.

“ _ What?” _ he said, and dissolved again into peals of laughter, reaching out for Richie. 

“Look,” Richie said, letting Eddie reel Richie in by an arm around the waist, and oh, right. He was comfortable around Eddie, more comfortable than he was around pretty much anyone else. He remembered their rhythm of interaction, slipped into it like a second skin, and, god, suddenly talking to him was easy again, like it had always been. “Look, I don’t  _ know _ , okay? The man I thought I was in doomed unrequited love with just claimed to requite it, and then I yelled at him and cried in his lap. I’m allowed to be a little bit discombobulated.” 

“It is so, so requited, Rich,” Eddie said, and—because he liked turning the tables on him and flustering the unflusterable Richie Tozier, Richie suspected—he said, “I love you,” again. It worked. “And stir fry is great.”

“You say that now,” he said. “But when you don’t have enough protein to make—”

“Okay, I know what you are about to say. Please do not say it.”

“Fine. Fine. But this, here, is me making a big sacrifice.”

“Huge.”

Richie winked, and Eddie said, “Really?” 

“Sorry, sorry. I’m just really pumped to have geriatric scheduled sex with you. Jeez.”

“I didn’t  _ schedule it _ ,” Eddie said. “I didn’t put it in my fucking GCal, Richie. You’re the one who proposed the sequence of events.”

“What the fuck is a GCal? Is it like iCarly? You know, I almost wrote for iCarly.”

“I have no idea what that means.” Richie started to explain, and Eddie held up a hand. “Do I want to know what it means?” 

“No, not particularly, and I’m not going to make you watch even more Nickelodeon right now, but just you wait. You will hate this show.”

“I liked SpongeBob.”

“Well, you will not like this.”

They ate on the couch, Eddie lined up warm and steady against Richie’s side. “This is really good, actually,” Eddie said.

“ _ This  _ generally, or specifically the faggy stir fry?”

“Just the stir fry,” Eddie said. 

“Too mean!” Richie said, miming being shot in the chest and flinging himself to the other side of the couch. “Too mean!”

“No, no, come back,” Eddie said, and started trying to haul Richie in. Richie put the back of his hand to his forehead like a damsel in distress, and Eddie as good as lay on top of him. “Come back,” he said again, quietly.

Richie smiled insanely at him. “Yeah, of course,” he said. “Whatever you want, Eds.”

Eddie blinked and inhaled sharply, then sat up. “I have to finish my stir fry,” he said, but instead of picking it up off Richie’s coffee table he bit his lip and looked at Richie. “Okay,” he said, “there’s something you should know. I’m gonna let you make fun of me for exactly ten seconds after I say it, so, just—keep that in mind.”

“Shoot.”

“I haven’t had sex in four years,” he said very quickly.

Richie felt the breath sputter out of him, and tried to contain it. “Gay sex, or sex in general?” he said, only a little audibly strained.

Eddie turned a bit red and said, “Sex in general.”

“Well, that sucks for you, and I’m sorry, but I gotta express that it does not, and will not, suck for me. You’re Eddie fucking Kaspbrak, dude.”

“What’s that supposed to— _ whatever _ ,” Eddie said, before Richie could explain exactly what it was supposed to mean. “Just keep any expectations you have very, very low.”

“My expectation is I’m gonna bone Eddie Kaspbrak,” Richie said. “Which is a pretty high expectation, but there’s literally nothing you could do to not live up to it. You could knee me in the balls and run away, and I’d be happy with that.”

“I’m not Seth Meyers, Richie,” Eddie muttered around his fork. 

Richie’s mouth made the beginnings of a lot of different words, but he was so stunned it took him a long time to choose which to go with. “You think I’d rather be fucking _ Seth Meyers _ ?”

Eddie shrugged. “You were talking about it a lot earlier. And—I don’t know. We’re in the same category.”

“Skinny? Mad at me?” Richie asked, and Eddie gave him a truly venomous look. “Is this because I called you an otter? Dude, I was really stressed out, please don’t take that too seriously. I mean, you are, technically, but.”

“ _ Technically _ ?” Eddie demanded. “Someone can be  _ technically  _ an otter? Is there a test? Is Seth Meyers  _ technically  _ an otter?”

“No, Seth Meyers is basically hairless,” Richie said. “It’s weird.” Eddie rolled his. “Okay,” Richie went on, “but what I’m saying is, like—Eddie, Seth Meyers is  _ you _ . I like Seth Meyers because I like  _ you _ .”

“You just said Seth Meyers was weirdly hairless.”

“That’s the point! You’re the original! Seth Meyers is the shitty knockoff!”

Eddie was putting down his plate and folding his arms. “Between me and Seth Meyers, only one person is professionally funny.”

“Okay, number one, you are way funnier than him,” Richie said. “Number two, I just got snot all over both of us because of how in love with you I am. Number three, I was literally only talking about Seth Meyers because I was trying to see if you were down.”

“If I was—” Eddie started, and then he got it. “That’s—Richie, that is  _ insane _ .”

“I don’t know how insane it was,” Richie said, “if it worked.”

“It did not  _ work! _ We had a huge fight!” Eddie said. “That’s like if I started talking about Harrison Ford at IKEA to try to seduce you. It doesn’t make any sense. It was a horrible plan.”

“Okay, tabling the fact that you are still that much of a fucking nerd—”

“Sorry I don’t personally know any celebrities!”

“That’s not the point. The point is this.” Richie swiveled around so he was making as much eye contact, and also skin contact, with Eddie as possible. “I’m really honored to pop your gay cherry.”

Eddie gave him a baleful look. “Do you not remember already doing that?”

“No actual cherries were popped, if you remember correctly. Cherries were skirted around. They were talked about. But they were never popped.”

“Okay, Bill Clinton,” Eddie said.

Richie laughed. “Wait,” he said jumping off the couch and running into the kitchen. “Wait one second, okay, this is gonna be good.” He threw open the cigarettes drawer and dug around.

“What are you doing?”

“Just wait one second, one hot second—”

“Wait for  _ what?” _

“Aha!” Richie said, and skidded back into the living room, waggling a cigar.

“Why do you have a cigar in your kitchen?” Eddie said. 

“Reminds me of my childhood, Monica,” Richie said, straight-faced, like he was talking to a therapist. Eddie laughed so hard he spilled the rest of his stir fry.

**Eddie**

Sex wasn’t exactly like riding a bicycle, where you never forgot how to do it, but Eddie was shocked by how little there was to remember, practically speaking. With Myra, it had always felt like there was a complicated procedure he’d misplaced his copy of and was desperately trying to reconstruct from memory. Now, the procedure was writing itself in real-time in Eddie’s mind, with alarming speed and detail. Mainly, Eddie just had to figure out how to suspend his carefully-developed protocol for crushing any trace of real desire enough that he could actually carry any of the steps out. The fact that Richie looked incapacitated by joy every time Eddie did pretty much anything made it a lot easier.

So things were going well, up until Eddie peeled out of his underwear and climbed back over Richie. Richie’s hands flew to Eddie’s hips, and he said, lowly, “I can’t believe you have cum gutters. What the fuck?”

Eddie’s blood ran cold. “What?”

“What do you mean, what?”

Eddie pulled back, and Richie didn’t follow him. He stepped off the bed, retrieved his briefs from where they’d landed across the room, and pulled them back on. This was very uncomfortable, given the circumstances, but he persevered.

“Literally, what is happening,” Richie said. “Why are you putting your clothes on?

Eddie realized that he had been waiting for the other shoe to drop. This, he guessed, was it. He’d spent his entire life thinking about his dick as little as possible and trying to convince everyone else to do the same. So much of his energy had gone into appearing as though he didn’t have any bodily processes, much less sex. He was aware that he was good-looking, but in the manner of a doll—not a sex doll, but a Ken doll, or, charitably, an action figure. He’d turned himself into an ornament, because an ornament, unlike a body, could be controlled, and if he couldn’t control anything else about his life, he could at least control himself.

Eddie had only ever known one real curse, and he’d shaken it twice, but there were other kinds of curses, too. These were usually earned. Certainly, if anyone deserved to be treated as a Ken doll for the rest of his life, it was Eddie, after all the time he’d spent throwing away the opportunity not to be one. He wasn’t a real human man anymore—he’d sloughed off everything about him that meant he had a body, that meant he was a body—so it would be unfair to ask Richie to pretend he was, to pretend things hadn’t atrophied and gone terribly awry in ways Eddie couldn’t see but everyone else could. It would be unfair, but Eddie still wished Richie would. He didn’t know how to be with Richie if he wouldn’t.

Richie sat on the edge of the bed. He still had his underwear on. Not the Smithers boxers, this time—these were boxer briefs that said PROPERTY OF ASHLEY over the crotch. At first he’d been kind of smiling at Eddie, like he thought there was some amusing sex game happening; now he looked increasingly worried. “Dude, what did I do?”

“Let’s just—whatever, Richie. We don’t have to do this.”

“Eddie, Eddie, hey,” Richie said. He was ducking his head around, trying to catch Eddie’s eye. “Seriously, please tell me what I did. I just need to know, man. I’m not gonna bother you about it.”

He looked so sad, and so hot, and Eddie just wanted to go back over there and stand between his legs and kiss him again, but the humiliation made the air too thick to move through. Eddie chewed on his lip. “I’m not, like,” Eddie said. “I’m sorry I’m not—I don’t know. I don’t want your pity, but you don’t have to be an asshole.”

Richie just stared at him for a second, eyebrows slightly furrowed. Then, he said, “Do you know what a cum gutter is?”

Eddie knew his face was red. “Um,” he said.

“You don’t?”

“Like I said,” Eddie said, “I’m really fucking sorry.” He reached for his shirt and pulled that on, too. “For whatever it is.”

“Eds,” Richie said, “ _ hold on _ . It’s not a bad thing. Holy shit.”

“What?”

“Yeah! Dude!”

“Well, it fucking sounds like one!” Eddie said. “Jesus Christ!”

“No! It’s—” Richie said, and then he tilted his head to the side. “What did you  _ think  _ a cum gutter was?”

“I thought it was...” Eddie trailed off. Richie made an excessive  _ go on _ motion. “Richie,  _ stop _ , okay. I thought it was something about my dick. Like—something weird about my dick.” Richie was staring at him in totally uncharacteristic bewilderment. “I thought you were making fun of my dick,” he summarized, not making eye contact.

“Okay,” Richie said. “Well. You have a really, really nice dick. I don’t really know what I'd make fun of. Great dick.” He looked sort of bereft, then blinked. “Also, more importantly—what the fuck? That isn’t what a—have you  _ seriously _ never heard of cum gutters?”

“Obviously I’ve never fucking heard of cum gutters,” Eddie snapped.

“Okay, okay! I didn’t want to talk down to you!”

Eddie crossed his arms and glared. 

“It’s, like, the,” and he gestured in a v-shape at Eddie’s lower abdomen. “That.”

“Obliques?”

“I genuinely have no idea what that means,” Richie said, “but, yeah, okay, obliques.” When Eddie didn’t respond, he clarified, “It’s hot. Like, insanely hot. Uncanny valley hotness level.”

“Oh,” Eddie said.

“Yeah,” Richie said. “You are the hottest person I have ever met, Eds.”

“That cannot possibly be true.”

Richie shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

They just looked at each other for a moment.

“Also, I still don’t get what part of a dick you’d think would be called a gutter. Why would there be a gutter on your dick?” Richie asked.

“Why would there be a gutter  _ near _ it?” Eddie demanded.

“For the cum,” Richie said. “It’s pretty simple, dude.”

“No, it is  _ not _ . Richie—ugh. That is such a disgusting phrase. It makes it sound like stuff’s getting lodged in there and has to be, like, raked out.”

“Yeah, the cum.”

“I will not have sex with you.” Richie pulled a downcast face that, for whatever reason, made Eddie feel like someone was sticking an electric cattle prod through his ear, straight into the center of his brain. “Stop it,” he said.

“Stop what?”

“Looking at me like—”

“Like I will literally die if you don’t fuck me? Because I will. That’s what I’m trying to communicate with my eyes: you will genuinely kill me if you don’t come back over here and kiss me.” 

“You want me to come back over there?” The cattle prod’s voltage was increasing steadily.

“Yup.”

“That’s a pretty rude way to ask,” Eddie said, basically channelling the electric currents through his vocal cords. “‘Yup’?” Richie was getting kind of crazy-eyed; Eddie kept talking. “Plus, you just tried to tell me that cum will get lodged in my obliques and have to be raked out.”

“I’ll rake it out,” Richie said. “Seriously, Eds, I will bring a huge ladder over and almost fall to my death in the process of scraping cum out of your obliques. I’ll do anything.” So eddie really had no choice but to gently bracket Richie with his arms and kiss him. Richie’s hands snaked over Eddie, between his arms, over his back, and landed on his ass, which he contorted his body into some sort of insane yogic “C” in order to grab. “Why are you so hot,” he murmured into Eddie’s chest. “So, so, so hot. I don’t even have any thoughts in my head right now, just my brain going,  _ so so so hot _ , over and over. So, congratu-fucking-lations, you broke me. Broke me like an egg.”

“And yet you’re still talking,” Eddie said. “How does that work?’

“My mouth’s like a chicken with its head cut off,” Richie said. “It just runs in circles for awhile.” He kicked Eddie’s ass—literally kicked it, hammering his heels into Eddie’s buttocks—and said, “Let's get this show on the road, and maybe it’ll stop.”

By the time they did get around to popping cherries, technically speaking, Richie’s mouth actually had, for once, stopped running in circles. Richie kept trying to burrow into the pillow, so Eddie grasped his jaw and said “look at me,” which resulted in Richie doing a damp, breathy nuzzle into his hand, eyes closed. Eddie wanted to see more of him. He wanted to fucking consume him, to strip him of everything and lick whatever was squirming beneath his skin. This was, Eddie admitted to himself, a weird thought to have, but for once he didn’t really care.

He grabbed Richie’s face again, slightly harder this time by total accident, but Richie seemed to like it, eyes fluttering shut, so Eddie kept doing it. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, Rich. Look at me.” Richie cracked one eye open and glanced at Eddie sidelong. “No, I mean, actually look at me.” When Richie did, with naked, open, watery eyes, Eddie felt like he’d been burned. Richie kept scrunching up his eyebrows and almost biting Eddie’s thumb, but he didn’t look away now, didn’t even try to, just kept watching eddie watch him until his eyes went empty and then closed. 

**Richie**

Something very weird had happened to Richie’s sleep schedule while Eddie had been in LA. He’d only stayed two days, but they’d spent the first morning at IKEA, and that night they’d had gone to bed around 11 pm, which knocked Richie out about five hours earlier than he normally went to sleep. The next morning, the unbelievable shock of seeing Eddie in his bed had kept Richie from passing back out the way he usually did when he woke up in fitful morning bursts. After that, Eddie had gone back to New York, but, almost two weeks later, Richie was still falling asleep at midnight. Of course, he was never in bed when this happened, but he would pass out on the couch, then wake up, disoriented, at four, and shuffle over to his room, where he’d sleep a few more hours. “You fucking broke me, dude,” he told Eddie over FaceTime, but Eddie just laughed and said, “You should be grateful,” which was mean on so many different levels.

So Richie ended up calling his dad at noon east-coast time, which was nine in the morning west-coast time. He thought it was maybe the uncharacteristic earliness that made Wentworth’s “hello” when he picked up sound so shocked, but Richie knew, really, that that wasn’t the half of it.

“Hey, dad,” Richie said. He felt like he was seventeen and calling his parents from the Uris’ home phone, so he clarified, “it’s Richie,” out of habit.

“I know, Rich,” Wentworth said. “We have caller ID.”

“Right,” Richie said. He tried to remember whether caller ID had been invented the last time he’d called his parents. Maybe, but he wasn’t sure whether he’d had a cellphone yet.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m not dying or anything,” Richie said.

“No,” Wentworth said. “I mean, are you doing okay, after, you know,” and he paused for a second, probably hoping Richie would finish the sentence for him, but Richie actually had no idea what he was driving at. “Coming out,” Wentworth said finally. This kind of made sense—they thought he was having a gay crisis, not a heart attack, but it was an emergency either way, because this was Richie, ever and only an emergent situation. He didn’t spend that much time thinking about how awful a son he was, because he was awful in so many other capacities too, but he really was a pretty terrible son.

But then Wentworth continued, “We’re both really proud of you,” which made so little sense that Richie gave up on trying to predict what Wentworth was thinking or going to say next. His dad always had been a weird guy.

“Uh, okay,” Richie said. “I mean, thanks, I guess? Anyway. I’m calling because I’m gonna start writing my own material again—” Wentworth made a choking noise, so Richie said, “I know, shocker, it wasn’t my material before,” and then realized that his dad had probably not watched his sets, had most likely learned about Richie’s hilarious puppet shenanigans via some Facebook link and was now utterly mortified, but Richie plowed on. “Anyway, I wasn’t writing my own shi—stuff, but I am now, so here’s what I was wondering: can I do a set about you?”

Wentworth started talking, and he made it through one syllable ( _ I’m— _ ) before Richie realized that he’d given his dad far too much wiggle room. “Keep in mind that I’m only asking to be polite. I only have so many jokes in me and if I’m selling them, I gotta sell them all, so. Yeah. But this is your chance to say yes.”

His dad didn’t say yes, but he did say, “Richie, you always had so many jokes. Remember when you were eleven, and you’d put pencils in your nose every time I played music?” Wentworth did a sad little two-syllable chuckle. “What was that about?”

“When you played the Beatles, dad. I was the walrus. I can’t believe I have to explain this to you.” He felt a moment of psychotic tenderness, and continued, possessed, “hey, you remember Eddie Kaspbrak?”

“The Polish kid?”

“Yeah. I mean, that’s not that big a leap. His name’s Kaspbrak. Doesn’t really convince me you remember him.”

Wentworth sighed loudly. “Richie.”

“Okay, so you remember him.”

“Yes.” Before Richie could add anything—who knew what his plan was, here,  _ I went back to Derry and met him again and I’m crazy in love and he’s moving to LA _ wasn’t exactly a viable strategy—Wentworth continued, “Richie, I’m sorry. I really am.” 

So he thought Richie had meant,  _ remember my high school boyfriend who you hated? Fuck you for that.  _ It was a pretty reasonable assumption, considering. “It’s okay,” Richie said. “Neither of us knew any better.”

“I’m your father. It was my job to know better than you did, back when you were a kid. And—” He couldn’t finish, couldn’t say  _ and I failed _ , but Richie knew what he meant.

Richie took a deep breath. “Yeah, well, I’m your son,” he said on the exhale. “It’s my job to call you guys more than twice a decade. Guess we’ve both been slacking.” It was weird, how much Richie wanted to comfort his father—he’d spent his entire adolescence rubbing his dad’s nose in how he’d hurt him, but now, all he wanted was to make him stop feeling guilty.

“You were always a sharp one,” Wentworth said, “even when you tried to pretend like you were slow. What jokes are you going to tell about me, then?”

“Oh, I dunno yet,” Richie said. “Do you have any ideas?” 

He’d hoped that his dad would reminisce with him some more, maybe tell his side of a funny story, but instead all he got was, “No, can’t think of anything. I was never good at jokes,” which was absolutely true. His dad was probably the least funny person Richie had ever met, and it would make everything weird if Richie tried prodding him into a sense of humor. Wouldn’t work, either.

It was strange, that Wentworth really had no qualities that Richie found appealing in people—or anything but contemptible, really—but Richie loved him anyway. Maybe it wasn’t love, just a misplaced, wrong-age sense of duty. Or maybe he had a regular-level shitty-but-decent dad who tried his best, who Richie loved like a regular-level shitty-but-decent son.

Richie wondered to what extent his dad could still read his mind. Probably not much, after so many years. “So,” he said finally, “do you have any funny dentist tools?”

“Rich, I’m retired.”

“Yeah, well, do you keep any around? Just to, like, threaten Mormons or mailmen or mom?”

“Mormons? Mailmen?  _ Mom? _ ” Wentworth said, alliterating with such earnest shock that Richie almost collapsed with nervous laughter. “I’m not a dog. I have nothing against the people who come to the door, or your mother.” He paused. “And I only have tools that I can use on my own teeth,” he added, like that was not the weirdest fucking thing to say.

“Like  _ what?  _ A drill? A pick? That vacuum-y thing? What are you using on your own teeth?” 

“Just the mirror, and an electric toothbrush.” Richie pictured his wrinkled, bent-backed father using a little round dentist’s mirror to floss in his own bathroom and thinking it was totally normal. “I still see another dentist, obviously.” 

Wentworth paused for a very long time, maybe wondering whether to ask Richie if he went to the dentist, or maybe contemplating the fever dream that was his sons’s life. Maybe both. 

Richie was reminded of when he was about ten years old, and his aunt died—his dad’s sister, actually, and it was insane that that simple fact had never seemed like important context before—and he would sit and listen to side B of _ Abbey Road  _ over and over, weeping uncontrollably. His dad had stood perfectly still, looming in the doorway like Slenderman, clenching and unclenching his hands and clearly wondering what to say. In the end, he said nothing, just lingering silently until Richie shouted at him to leave, which really ought to have been common sense. 

It had made Richie so rabidly angry, when his dad would just stand there and watch him cry, made him feel stupid, and vulnerable, and wrong. Afterwards, he’d always be compelled to make a loud disobedient spectacle of himself, desperate to replace Wentworth’s memories of him being a pussy with ones of him being a dick. 

Now, he felt more like Wentworth than like his childhood self, stuck in some in-between state, looking at whatever actions he had or had not taken that could have resulted in such crazy, absurd grief, with no idea what to say. His dad breathed damply over the phone. It sounded, maybe, like tears. So Richie said something: “Well, anyway, thanks.” He hung up. 

He felt like he did that day in court, standing with his horrible slack face and wrinkled suit, reciting the circumstances of Bowers’s death, trying to keep his voice even. That day, he’d thought, over and over, on a terrible loop,  _ who the fuck am I to do this?  _ Who was he to kill someone, and who was he to act like he’d had to? Who the fuck was he to do anything? He hadn’t done something real, something that mattered—good or bad—in years. About twenty, actually.

Of course, what he’d done all those years  _ had _ mattered, he’d just pretended it didn’t. It fucking sucked, mattering, but there wasn’t really an alternative. You mattered or you pretended you didn’t. Richie’d tried the second one, and it hadn’t sucked any less; in fact, it had sucked more.

He’d call his dad again, soon. He’d call his mom, too. Maybe he’d even call Rabbi Uris. And he’d probably say the wrong thing to all of them, but at least he wouldn’t be saying nothing at all.

Now he called Eddie, who was halfway through his last day at work. “Richie,” he said as soon as he picked up, “these people bought a macaron croquembouche for me,” and Richie pretended not to know what a macaron was, much less a croquembouche, and Eddie laughed around his salad.

Richie knew he would fuck up, inevitably, with Eddie—he’d already fucked up in numerous and diverse ways—but maybe not any worse than everyone fucked everything up. He was a regular-level shitty-but-decent guy, which gave him a regular-level shitty-but-decent shot at making this stick.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the graphic depiction of violence is richie’s sentence-long description of bowers’ corpse
> 
> ANYWAY—thanks to everyone who commented for making the writing of this such an unmitigated joy. several sequels are in the works. and sheepknitssweater is on tumblr at palebluehalo if you want to say hi! we also just made a twitter @lcandsks which we do not know how to use.

**Author's Note:**

> eddie's music preferences c/o Beachcoma by fluorescentgrey

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [PODFIC: Collateral](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25534078) by [reigenagain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reigenagain/pseuds/reigenagain), [skeilig_mp3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skeilig_mp3/pseuds/skeilig_mp3)




End file.
